An online repository of published organic fluorescence spectra has been developed, which can be searched for quantitative matches with any set of unknown spectra.

BackgroundToday, data evaluation has become a bottleneck in chromatographic science. Analytical instruments equipped with automated samplers yield large amounts of measurement data, which needs to be verified and analyzed. Since nearly every GC/MS instrument vendor offers its own data format and software tools, the consequences are problems with data exchange and a lack of comparability between the analytical results. To challenge this situation a number of either commercial or non-profit software applications have been developed. These applications provide functionalities to import and analyze several data formats but have shortcomings in terms of the transparency of the implemented analytical algorithms and/or are restricted to a specific computer platform.ResultsThis work describes a native approach to handle chromatographic data files. The approach can be extended in its functionality such as facilities to detect baselines, to detect, integrate and identify peaks and to compare mass spectra, as well as the ability to internationalize the application. Additionally, filters can be applied on the chromatographic data to enhance its quality, for example to remove background and noise. Extended operations like do, undo and redo are supported.ConclusionsOpenChrom is a software application to edit and analyze mass spectrometric chromatographic data. It is extensible in many different ways, depending on the demands of the users or the analytical procedures and algorithms. It offers a customizable graphical user interface. The software is independent of the operating system, due to the fact that the Rich Client Platform is written in Java. OpenChrom is released under the Eclipse Public License 1.0 (EPL). There are no license constraints regarding extensions. They can be published using open source as well as proprietary licenses. OpenChrom is available free of charge at http://www.openchrom.net.

The spectra responsible for natural dissolved organic matter (DOM) fluorescence in 90 peer-reviewed studies have been compared using new similarity metrics. Numerous spectra cluster in specific wavelength regions. The emerging patterns suggest that most fluorescence spectra are not tied to biogeochemical origin, but exist across a wide range of different environments. † Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available: Denitions of shi-and shape sensitive congruence , information on the processing of OpenFluor models, and meta-analysis of model similarities. See

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