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Mass Spectrometry (MS) is a largely used analytical technique in biology with applications such as the determination of molecule masses or the elucidation of structural data. Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance MS is one implementation of the technique allowing high resolution and mass accuracy and based on trapping ions in circular orbits thanks to powerful Electromagnetic fields. This method has been extended to two-dimensional analysis, this gives signals containing a lot more information, for a reasonable amount of time and samples. However, the data provided by such experiments cannot be stored in a classical manner and require some tools and architecture to store and compress data so that they remain accessible and usable without necessitating too much computer memory. The developed python program permits to turn these huge raw data into exploitable FTICR MS HDF5 formatted datasets which can be relatively rapidly and efficiently deconvolved and analysed using a Primal-Dual Splitting algorithm., Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures

Liquid state NMR is a powerful tool for the analysis of complex mixtures of unknown molecules. This capacity has been used in many analytical approaches: metabolomics, identification of active compounds in natural extracts, characterization of species, and such studies require the acquisition of many diverse NMR measurements on series of samples. While acquisition can easily be performed automatically, the number of NMR experiments involved in these studies increases very rapidly and this data avalanche requires to resort to automatic processing and analysis. We present here a program that allows the autonomous, unsupervised processing of a large corpus of 1D, 2D and DOSY experiments from a series of samples acquired in different conditions. The program provides all the signal processing steps, as well as peak-picking and bucketing of 1D and 2D spectra, the program and its components are fully available. In an experiment mimicking the search of an active species in natural extract, we use it for the automatic detection of small amounts of artemisin added to a series of plant extracts, and for the generation of the spectral fingerprint of this molecules. This program called Plasmodesma is a novel tool which should be useful to decipher complex mixtures, particularly in the discovery of biologically active natural products from plants extracts, but can also in drug discovery or metabolomics studies., Comment: 35 pages, 36 figures, 26 references

Computer science offers a large set of tools for prototyping, writing, running, testing, validating, sharing and reproducing results, however computational science lags behind. In the best case, authors may provide their source code as a compressed archive and they may feel confident their research is reproducible. But this is not exactly true. James Buckheit and David Donoho proposed more than two decades ago that an article about computational results is advertising, not scholarship. The actual scholarship is the full software environment, code, and data that produced the result. This implies new workflows, in particular in peer-reviews. Existing journals have been slow to adapt: source codes are rarely requested, hardly ever actually executed to check that they produce the results advertised in the article. ReScience is a peer-reviewed journal that targets computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research, promoting new and open-source implementations in order to ensure that the original research can be replicated from its description. To achieve this goal, the whole publishing chain is radically different from other traditional scientific journals. ReScience resides on GitHub where each new implementation of a computational study is made available together with comments, explanations, and software tests., Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure

NMR is a tool of choice for the measure of diffusion coefficients of species in solution. The DOSY experiment, a 2D implementation of this measure, has proven to be particularly useful for the study of complex mixtures, molecular interactions, polymers, etc. However, DOSY data analysis requires to resort to inverse Laplace transform, in particular for polydisperse samples. This is a known difficult numerical task, for which we present here a novel approach. A new algorithm based on a splitting scheme and on the use of proximity operators is introduced. Used in conjunction with a Maximum Entropy and $\ell_1$ hybrid regularisation, this algorithm converges rapidly and produces results robust against experimental noise. This method has been called PALMA. It is able to reproduce faithfully monodisperse as well as polydisperse systems, and numerous simulated and experimental examples are presented. It has been implemented on the server http://palma.labo.igbmc.fr where users can have their datasets processed automatically., Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures revised version, with new examples

We present SPIKE (Spectrometry Processing Innovative KErnel), an open-source Python package dedicated to Fourier spectroscopies. It provides basic functionalities such as apodisation, a complete set of Fourier transforms, phasing for NMR), peak-picking, baseline correction and also tools such as Linear Prediction. Beside its versatility, the most prominent novelty of this package is to incorporate new tools for Big Data processing. This is exemplified by its ability to handle the processing and visualization of very large data-sets, with multiprocessor capabilities and a low memory footprint. The software contains also all the tools necessary for the specific fast processing and visualization of 2D-FTICR-MS data-sets., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures

NMR spectroscopy is an excellent tool for monitoring in-situ chemical reactions. In particular, DOSY measurement is well suited to characterize transient species by the determination of their sizes. However, here we bring to light a difficulty in the DOSY experiments performed in out-of-equilibrium systems. On such a system, the evolution of the concentration of species interferes with the measurement process, and creates a bias on the diffusion coefficient determination that may lead to erroneous interpretations. We show that a random permutation of the series of gradient strengths used during the DOSY experiment allows to average out this bias. This approach, that we name p-DOSY does not require changes in the the pulse sequences nor in the processing software, and restores completely the full accuracy of the measure. This technique is demonstrated on the monitoring of the anomerization reaction of \alpha- to \beta-glucose., Comment: Revised version - 15 pages, 8 figures program archived at 10.5281/zenodo.19261

The tertiary structure of protein, as well as the local secondary structure organization are fully determined by the angles of the peptidic bound. The backbone dihedral angles not only determine the global fold of the protein, but also the details of the local chain organization. Although a wealth of structural information is available in different databases and numerous structural biology softwares have been developed, rapid conformational characterization remains challenging. We present here RamaDA, a program able to give a synthetic description of the conformation of a protein. The RamaDA program is based on a model where the Ramachadran plot is decomposed into seven conformational domains. Within the framework of this model, each amino-acid of a given protein is assigned to one of these domains. From this assignment secondary structure elements can be detected with an accuracy equivalent to that of the DSSP program for helices and extended strands, and with the added capability of detecting PolyProline II secondary structures. Additionally, the determination of a z-score for each amino-acid of the protein emphasizes any irregularities in the element. It is also possible to use this analysis to detect characteristic conformational patterns. In the case of EF-hands, calcium-binding helix-loop-helix domains, it is possible to design a strict consensus for the 9 amino-acids of the loop. 523 calcium binding protein files can be found into the entire PDB with this pattern and only 2.7% false positive hits are detected. The program RamaDA gathers several tools in one and is then able to give a complete information on a protein structure, including loops and random coil regions. Through the example of EF-hands, a promising approach of structural biology is developed. RamaDA is freely available for download as well as online usage at http://ramada.u-strasbg.fr, Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables