Different strategies have been suggested for forming representative spectra. Frank et al. (JPR 2008) list five strategies, where one selects the representative spectrum to be:
- The "best spectrum”: the spectrum that maximizes a certain score, e.g., percent of explained intensity or percent of explained b/y ions.
- The “consensus spectrum”: a virtual spectrum constructed by averaging all spectra in the cluster. (Tabb et al. JASMS 2005)
- The “most similar spectrum”: the spectrum that has the highest average similarity to the other cluster members (Tabb et al. Anal Chem 2003).
- The “de novo spectrum”: the spectrum that has the highest score when submitted to de novo sequencing.
- The random spectrum: a spectrum chosen from the cluster at random.
- Skyline BiblioSpec - Best Spectrum in Cluster .
- spectra-cluster (PRIDE) - Consensus spectrum.
- SpectraST - Consensus cluster.
- NIST - Consensus spectra
Proteome tool's publication Zolg et al. We have extracted a subset of this set to a google drive.