Remember spectral clusting? It's back and improved!

 A while back a bunch of people got together and said something smart like "wait, what if we just took all the MS/MS spectra that are associated with disease X and cluster them together?" 

The end result was supposed to be a file that is spectra that you'd know are disease X spectra and you can focus on figuring them out. Super smart, right? 

I rambled about it a couple times over the years. Here is a blog post from 5 years ago. These tools still exist and are still active, but I haven't seen them in use in a long time.

It's still smart, but maybe the concept needs an upgrade? That's what Falcon is! 

As these authors point out speed is an issue for the original code. How fast were the mass specs when the first paper came out? Not as fast as they are now! And this approach only really makes sense when you look at a lot of files. 

Falcon is fast because it reduces MS/MS spectra down to vectors and with the data massively reduced it can do smart things with it, like nearest neighbor searches. 

Want to try it? You can get it here!