Nonribosomal peptides have a wide range of biological and medical applications. Their identification by tandem mass spectrometry remains a challenging task. A new open-source de novo peptide identification engine CycloBranch was developed and successfully applied in identification or detailed characterization of 11 linear, cyclic, branched, and branch-cyclic peptides. CycloBranch is based on annotated building block databases the size of which is defined by the user according to ribosomal or nonribosomal peptide origin. The current number of involved nonisobaric and isobaric building blocks is 287 and 521, respectively. Contrary to all other peptide sequencing tools utilizing either peptide libraries or peptide fragment libraries, CycloBranch represents a true de novo sequencing engine developed for accurate mass spectrometric data. It is a stand-alone and cross-platform application with a graphical and user-friendly interface; it supports mzML, mzXML, mgf, txt, and baf file formats and can be run in parallel on multiple threads. It can be downloaded for free from http://ms.biomed.cas.cz/cyclobranch/ , where the User's manual and video tutorials can be found.

• Keywords
• Branch-cyclic, Branched, Cyclic, De novo sequencing, Linear, Nonribosomal peptides,
• MeSH
• Algorithms MeSH
• Peptide Fragments MeSH
• Peptides analysis   chemistry   MeSH
• Sequence Analysis, Protein methods   MeSH
• Tandem Mass Spectrometry methods   MeSH
• User-Computer Interface MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH
• Names of Substances
• Peptide Fragments MeSH
• Peptides MeSH