OpenChrom: a cross-platform open source software for the mass spectrometric analysis of chromatographic data

Background Today, 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.