An effective algorithm for peptide de novo sequencing from mixture MS/MS Spectra

Abstract

In the past decade, extensive research has been conducted for the computational analysis of mass spectrometry based proteomics data. Yet, there are still remaining challenges, among which, one particular challenge is that the identification rate of the MS/MS spectra collected is rather low. One significant reason that contributes to this situation is the concurrent fragmentation of multiple precursors in a single MS/MS spectrum. Nearly all the mainstream computational methods take the assumption that the acquired spectra come from a single precursor, thus they are not suitable for the identification of mixture spectra. In this research, we formulated the mixture spectra de novo sequencing problem mathematically, and proposed a dynamic programming algorithm for the problem. Experiment shows that our proposed algorithm can serve as a complimentary method for the identification of mixture spectra. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.