Liquid Chromatography - Tandem Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) and Gas Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) Reference Libraries from Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking (GNPS) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) WebBook Processed for Spectral Library Matching

In order to obtain a high-quality LC-MS/MS reference database for spectral library matching, we selected 22 high-quality GNPS tandem mass spectrometry databases generated under the positive ion mode. Further preprocessing similar to Huber et al involving mass-to-charge (m/z) and intensity filtering yields the database found in the file LCMS_GNPS_reference_library.csv which contains 14,705 electrospray ionization (ESI) mass spectra, each of which corresponds to a unique compound. The NIST WebBook database was used to construct GC-MS database contained in the file GCMS_NIST_WebBook.csv. This database contains 23,721 electron ionization (EI) mass spectra, each of which corresponds to a unique non-hyphenated Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) Registry Number.

 

Both LC-MS/MS and GC-MS databases are organized into three columns: one for the identifier, one for the m/z values, and one for the intensity values. For example, if spectrum A has 20 ion fragments, then there will be 20 rows corresponding to spectrum A in the corresponding database with the identifier A repeated 20 times with the corresponding m/z and intensity values.