# Associate Mascot identifications from a CSV file

This operation allows you to associate Mascot identifications from a CSV file with a Maldi plate.

This operation has been designed to effectively manage experiments involving several Maldi plates and different sets of Mascot identifications. This way, instead of loading them separately and associating them in the momment of analyzing Spots data in the Integrated analysis view, users can associate all Maldi plates and Mascot identifications once, save them as a CSV file and then reusing this associated set of Spot Mascot identifications.

Usage

You can execute this operation by clicking the menu option Operations/Associate Mascot identifications from a CSV file.

A dialog will appear allowing you to select the source CSV Mascot identifications file and MPL Maldi plate file. As you can see in the following image, this dialog requires you to provide the following information:

- Protein identifications: a CSV file containing the Mascot identifications.
- CSV format: the CSV format of the selected CSV file. S2P includes two preconfigured formats for Excel and Open/LibreOffice applications. In case you need to specify a custom CSV format you can select the Custom option, which allows you to configure the CSV format.
- Minimum Mascot Score: the minimum Mascot Score for identifications to be loaded. Entries within a lower Mascot Score are not loaded.
- Remove duplicates: whether duplicated identifications must be skipped. Check this option to remove duplicated identifications.
- Maldi plate: A MPL file containing the Maldi plate.
- Spot identifications: optionally, a previously loaded Spot identifications to add the new data.

Associate Mascot identifications dialog

As commented above, you can customize the CSV format by selecting the Custom format option. When you select this option, the following custom format panel will be shown in the dialog. The options included in this panel will allow you to customize the CSV format:

- Quote fields: if this option is selected, then all fields will be quoted in the resulting CSV file.
- Column separator: the separator character/s between columns.
- Decimal separator: the character to use as decimal separator. Note that the decimal separator should be different from the column separator; otherwise, it may result in an unreadable CSV file.
- Line break: the type of line break depending in the target operating system.

Custom CSV panel

After clicking the Ok button, the associated identifications are added as a Spot Mascot identifications datatype to the clipboard and automatically opened in the Spot Mascot identifications table.