LC-MSsim : A simulator for LC-MS (Liquid Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry) data.

This software was developed using OpenMS, an open source software library for mass spectrometry data analysis.

LC-MSsim was developed for Linux. It runs as well under Windows using the MinGW compiler suite. The software should run under all recent Linux distributions. It was tested under Debian Sarge and Ubuntu “Dapper Drake”.

LC-MSsim is a commandline tool and does not (yet) have a Graphical User Interface. You can, however, use the OpenMS tools INIFileEditor and TOPPview to edit its configuration files and to visualize the simulated LC-MS runs, respectively.

Installation instructions:

  1. Download and install OpenMS release 1.1 as described on the OpenMS webpage .

  2. Checkout the most recent LC-MSsim sourcecode from its sourceforge repository using:

    svn co https://lcms-sim.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lcms-sim lcms-sim

  3. Adopt the makefile and execute make.

  4. Get an overview of the LC-MSsim default parameter by executing ./MapSimulator.

Note that if you use Windows, you should install OpenMS 1.1 since it is based on Cygwin. LC-MSsim will not work with the most recent Windows version of OpenMS. The next OpenMS release will contain LC-MSsim and will make the installation a lot easier! We are also working on the simulation of MS/MS spectra. Please stay tuned.

If you run into problems, please contact Ole Schulz-Trieglaff :



The paper describing LC-MSsim has been published by BMC Bioinformatics:
Schulz-Trieglaff, Pfeifer, Groepl, Kohlbacher and Reinert (2008) LC-MSsim - a simulation software for Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry data
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/423
In this work, we performed a comparison of several LC-MS feature detection algorithms. You can find the parameter settings here.


This project is hosted by