Abstract
In this study, we present a preprocessing method for quadrupole time-of-flight (Q-TOF) tandem mass spectra to increase the accuracy of database searching for peptide (protein) identification. Based on the natural isotopic information inherent in tandem mass spectra, we construct a decision tree after feature selection to classify the noise and ion peaks in tandem spectra. Furthermore, we recognize overlapping peaks to find the monoisotopic masses of ions for the following identification process. The experimental results show that this preprocessing method increases the search speed and the reliability of peptide identification.