Skip to content

GC-MS annotation not working in Linux Console App (v5.5) - MSP library not loaded #733

Description

@MengdieYang

Hi, I am running MS-DIAL Console App v5.5 (MSDIAL.console.v5.5.260323-linux-net8) on Ubuntu 22.04 (WSL2) and encountering an issue where the MSP spectral library is not being loaded during GC-MS annotation, resulting in all peaks being reported as "Unknown".
Environment:

OS: Ubuntu 22.04 (WSL2 on Windows)
MS-DIAL version: v5.5.260323 (linux-net8 build)
Data format: ABF
Ion mode: Positive, Centroid, GC-MS

Parameter file (relevant section):
MSP file: /home/melody/msdial/libraries/NIST20_combined.msp
Retention type: RT
EI similarity tolerance for identification: 80
Identification score cut off: 70
What happens:
The pipeline runs successfully through peak picking, deconvolution, and alignment for all 4 samples. However, all features in the output .mdalign file have Metabolite name: Unknown and Total score: null. When grepping the log output for any MSP/library/database-related messages, only Annotation started is printed — there is no indication that the MSP file is ever read or loaded.
I also tested with a minimal 2-compound MSP file to rule out library format issues, but the result was the same — no compounds were matched.
The run always ends with the following error during mzTab export:
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at CompMs.MsdialCore.Export.MztabFormatExporter.SetOntology(AlignmentSpotProperty spot)
This suggests the annotation result object is null, consistent with the MSP library not being loaded at all.
Question:
Is GC-MS MSP library annotation supported in the Linux build of the Console App v5.5? If so, is there a known issue with the MSP file path parsing on Linux, or a workaround to get annotation working?
Thank you.

Msdial-GCMS-Param.txt

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions