Complete Data Analysis Workflow for Quantitative DIA Mass Spectrometry Using Nextflow




Perk, Mats; Pietilä, Sami; Välikangas, Tommi; Balint, Balazs; Suomi, Tomi; Elo, Laura L.

PublisherAmerican Chemical Society (ACS)

2026

 Journal of Proteome Research

1535-3893

1535-3907

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jproteome.5c00266

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jproteome.5c00266

https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/515617692



Data-independent acquisition (DIA) mass spectrometry is a technique used in proteomics to identify and quantify proteins in complex biological samples. While this comprehensive approach yields more complete and reproducible protein profiles than data-independent acquisition (DDA), the resulting data are substantially larger and more complex, presenting significant challenges for data analysis and interpretation. These challenges can be effectively addressed using dedicated workflow managers that support parallel execution of complex analysis pipelines on high-performance computing infrastructure. Nextflow, in particular, is well-suited for streamlining data analysis, as it automates key aspects of workflow management, allowing researchers to efficiently analyze large-scale data sets with minimal manual intervention. Here, we describe glaDIAtor-nf, a Nextflow version of our software package glaDIAtor for untargeted analysis of DIA mass spectrometry proteomics data. We first demonstrate its technical accuracy through rigorous testing on gold standard data sets. Building on this, we then reveal known proteome patterns from public breast cancer data that remained hidden in the processed data of the original study. This illustrates the potential of reanalyzing the accumulating public data, but also highlights the need for convenient tools to facilitate such reanalysis in large-scale.


Prof. Elo reports grants from the European Research Council ERC (677943), European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (955321), Research Council of Finland (335611, 341342, 364700), Sigrid Juselius Foundation, and Cancer Foundation Finland during the conduct of the study. This work was supported by ELIXIR, the research infrastructure for life science data, and our research is also supported by Biocenter Finland.


Last updated on 26/02/2026 11:06:00 AM