The Crux mass spectrometry analysis toolkit is an open source project that aims to provide users with a cross-platform suite of analysis tools for interpreting protein mass spectrometry data. The toolkit includes several search engines for both standard and cross-linked database search, as well as a variety of pre- and post-processing engines for assigning high-resolution precursor masses to spectra, assigning statistical confidence estimates to spectra, peptides and proteins, and performing label free quantification. Crux comes pre-complied for the Linux, Windows and MacOS operating systems. It is implemented as a single program that offers a wide variety of commands. If you use Crux in your research, please cite:

Christopher Y. Park, Aaron A. Klammer, Lukas Käll, Michael J. MacCoss and William Stafford Noble. "Rapid and accurate peptide identification from tandem mass spectra." Journal of Proteome Research. 7(7):3022-3027, 2008.

For a more up-to-date description of Crux, please read:

Sean McIlwain, Kaipo Tamura, Attila Kertesz-Farkas, Charles E. Grant, Benjamin Diament, Barbara Frewen, J. Jeffry Howbert, Michael R. Hoopmann, Lukas Käll, Jimmy K. Eng, Michael J. MacCoss and William Stafford Noble. "Crux: rapid open source protein tandem mass spectrometry analysis." Journal of Proteome Research. 13(10):4488-4491, 2014.

Home page: http://crux.ms