Methods and apparatuses for determining the intact mass of large molecules from mass spectrographic data

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing a set of instructions capable of being executed by a processor, that when executed by the processor causes the processor to:

• receive a measured mass over charge (m/z) spectrum for the sample;
• perform parsimony weighting to determine a parsimonious neutral mass spectrum by:
• (a) setting charge assignments for a number of bins of the measured m/z spectrum to be equally likely;
• (b) determining the deconvoluted mass spectrum based on the charge assignments for the number of bins of the measured m/z spectrum;
• (c) recomputing charge assignments for the number of bins of the measured m/z spectrum based on the deconvoluted mass spectrum;
• (d) repeating steps (b)-(c) until the charge assignments converge or until the number of repetitions of steps (b)-(c) reach a predetermined number of iterations;
• and
• use the parsimonious neutral mass spectrum to identify or characterize at least one property of the sample.