Although mzIdentML has been widely adopted, it was felt that for some applications, a simpler tab-delimited format capable of encoding the most important information would be beneficial. The mzTab format was conceived as such a relatively simple format that could encode both identification and quantification, applicable to both bottom-up MS proteomics as well as smallmolecule MS metabolomics. It has been implemented in several software packages (mainly for identification data, not for quantification) such as Mascot , OpenMS , and MaxQuant 47 , and ProteomeXchange repositories .