Summary

Developed by researchers at McMaster University, the GC/MS Analysis Software Package (GASP) aligns peaks from multiple gas chromatograms enabling the user to detect statistically significant differences between levels of compounds present in the specimen under study.

GASP is a cross-platform software developed in C++ with wxWidgets as GUI framework, that allows the comparison of GC/MS runs in order to determine differences in composition of multiple gas chromatogram samples. The software extracts and converts the data from the output files generated by various GC/MS instruments.

The program reads output files from Xcalibur, HP Chemstation and AMDIS, converts and aligns these files in order to make the comparisons.

GASP software can also align chromatographic data processed by AMDIS deconvolution software (available from NIST). The alignment file shows identical components appearing in the same row and provides an easy way to visualize the presence or absence of specific components in successive GC/MS runs.

GASP offers links to the publicly available statistical package, “R”, allowing many different statistical analyses to be performed automatically.