Waterloo, Ontario – BSI has officially concluded the PEAKS 5.3 Challenge and selected a winner, Arttu Heinonen from the University of Turku. We would like to thank everyone who participated in the PEAKS Challenge. We are extremely pleased to see how well PEAKS performed against other available database search engines. Arttu Heinonen was randomly selected from the list of participants who submitted a screenshot of the inChorus Summary Pane showing a comparison of PEAKS DB and third-party search engines (such as Mascot, Sequest, X!Tandem, OMSSA).

Since we are enthusiastic about algorithms, drawing a name from a hat would not suffice…

To randomly select the winner from the submissions we performed the following steps:

• Numbered the participants from 1…n (n = number of submissions)
• Selected the Dow Jones Industrial Average Closing Value from November 30, 2011 (12045.68)
• Round to the closest integer (12046)
• Divide by number of participants (n)
• Use the remainder as the winner (0.875*n = winning participant’s number)

We would like to thank everyone who participated in the PEAKS Challenge. While you may have missed out on the chance to win, it is not too late to download PEAKS and see for yourself just how sensitive and accurate PEAKS’ results are compared to other database search engines, using your own data.

In addition to our improved database search engine, many of our users like these awesome features:

1. The ability to generate high-confidence de novo sequence tags


2. DB Result Summary View, providing all the necessary statistical charts for result validation and publication


3. inChorus results, showing multiple search engines’ peptide identification results side by side.