Fig. 3: Statistical assessment of the E. coli 16S data acquired on different MS instruments.

a 16S sample preparation and analysis workflow. (b–d, left) Sp scatter plots of best matching targets vs their highest-scoring competing decoy sequences for Q-TOF, Synapt and Orbitrap datasets. Histograms on top show the Sp score distributions of targets (blue) and decoys (red). (b–d, right) Distributions of the Sp scores for OSMs with rank = 1. Targets are in blue, and decoys are in red. b–d Light and heavy targets and decoys matches were used for analysis, with a total number shown on each figure. Targets with at least one competing decoy are shown on the plots, and targets without decoys are excluded. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.