diaTracer enables spectrum-centric analysis of diaPASEF proteomics data

Data-independent acquisition has become a widely used strategy for peptide and protein quantification in liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry-based proteomics studies. The integration of ion mobility separation into data-independent acquisition analysis, such as the diaPASEF technology available on Bruker's timsTOF platform, further improves the quantification accuracy and protein depth achievable using data-independent acquisition. We introduce diaTracer, a spectrum-centric computational tool optimized for diaPASEF data. diaTracer performs three-dimensional (mass to charge ratio, retention time, ion mobility) peak tracing and feature detection to generate precursor-resolved "pseudo-tandem mass spectra", facilitating direct ("spectral-library free") peptide identification and quantification from diaPASEF data. diaTracer is available as a stand-alone tool and is fully integrated into the widely used FragPipe computational platform. We demonstrate the performance of diaTracer and FragPipe using diaPASEF data from triple-negative breast cancer, cerebrospinal fluid, and plasma samples, data from phosphoproteomics and human leukocyte antigens immunopeptidomics experiments, and low-input data from a spatial proteomics study. We also show that diaTracer enables unrestricted identification of post-translational modifications from diaPASEF data using open/mass-offset searches.