title: Peptide mass fingerprinting using field-programmable gate arrays.
abstract: The reconfigurable computing paradigm, which exploits the flexibility and versatility of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), has emerged as a powerful solution for speeding up time-critical algorithms. This paper describes a reconfigurable computing solution for processing raw mass spectrometric data generated by MALDI-TOF instruments. The hardware-implemented algorithms for denoising, baseline correction, peak identification, and deisotoping, running on a Xilinx Virtex-2 FPGA at 180 MHz, generate a mass fingerprint that is over 100 times faster than an equivalent algorithm written in C, running on a Dual 3-GHz Xeon server. The results obtained using the FPGA implementation are virtually identical to those generated by a commercial software package MassLynx.
authors.forename: I A
authors.initials: IA
authors.lastname: Bogdan
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Coca
authors.forename: R J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Beynon