DECA, a comprehensive, automatic post-processing program for HDX-MS data

Amide hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) has become widely popular for mapping protein-ligand interfaces, for understanding protein-protein interactions, and for discovering dynamic allostery. Several platforms are now available which provide large datasets of amide hydrogen/deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) data. Although many of these platforms provide some down-stream processing, a comprehensive software that provides  the most commonly used down-stream processing tools such as automatic back-exchange correction options, analysis of overlapping peptides, calculations of relative deuterium uptake into regions of the protein after such corrections, rigorous statistical analysis of the significance of uptake differences, and generation of high quality figures for data presentation is not yet available. Here we describe the Deuterium Exchange Correction and Analysis (DECA) software package, which provides all of these downstream processing options for data from the most popular mass spectrometry platforms. The major functions of the software are demonstrated on sample data.