A mass spectrometry-guided genome mining approach for natural product peptidogenomics.

Peptide natural products show broad biological properties and are commonly produced by orthogonal ribosomal and nonribosomal pathways in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. To harvest this large and diverse resource of bioactive molecules, we introduce here natural product peptidogenomics (NPP), a new MS-guided genome-mining method that connects the chemotypes of peptide natural products to their biosynthetic gene clusters by iteratively matching de novo tandem MS (MS(n)) structures to genomics-based structures following biosynthetic logic. In this study, we show that NPP enabled the rapid characterization of over ten chemically diverse ribosomal and nonribosomal peptide natural products of previously unidentified composition from Streptomycete bacteria as a proof of concept to begin automating the genome-mining process. We show the identification of lantipeptides, lasso peptides, linardins, formylated peptides and lipopeptides, many of which are from well-characterized model Streptomycetes, highlighting the power of NPP in the discovery of new peptide natural products from even intensely studied organisms

ISPTM: an Iterative Search Algorithm for Systematic Identification of Post-translational Modifications from Complex Proteome Mixtures

Identifying protein post-translational modifications (PTMs) from tandem mass spectrometry data of complex proteome mixtures is a highly challenging task. Here we present a new strategy, named iterative search for identifying PTMs (ISPTM), for tackling this challenge. The ISPTM approach consists of a basic search with no variable modification, followed by iterative searches of many PTMs using a small number of them (usually two) in each search. The performance of the ISPTM approach was evaluated on mixtures of 70 synthetic peptides with known modifications, on an 18-protein standard mixture with unknown modifications and on real, complex biological samples of mouse nuclear matrix proteins with unknown modifications. ISPTM revealed that many chemical PTMs were introduced by urea and iodoacetamide during sample preparation and many biological PTMs, including dimethylation of arginine and lysine, were significantly activated by Adriamycin treatment in NM associated proteins. ISPTM increased the MS/MS spectral identification rate substantially, displayed significantly better sensitivity for systematic PTM identification than the conventional all-in-one search approach and offered PTM identification results that were complementary to InsPecT and MODa, both of which are established PTM identification algorithms. In summary, ISPTM is a new and powerful tool for unbiased identification of many different PTMs with high confidence from complex proteome mixtures

msmsEval: tandem mass spectral quality assignment for high-throughput proteomics

BACKGROUND: In proteomics experiments, database-search programs are the method of choice for protein identification from tandem mass spectra. As amino acid sequence databases grow however, computing resources required for these programs have become prohibitive, particularly in searches for modified proteins. Recently, methods to limit the number of spectra to be searched based on spectral quality have been proposed by different research groups, but rankings of spectral quality have thus far been based on arbitrary cut-off values. In this work, we develop a more readily interpretable spectral quality statistic by providing probability values for the likelihood that spectra will be identifiable. RESULTS: We describe an application, msmsEval, that builds on previous work by statistically modeling the spectral quality discriminant function using a Gaussian mixture model. This allows a researcher to filter spectra based on the probability that a spectrum will ultimately be identified by database searching. We show that spectra that are predicted by msmsEval to be of high quality, yet remain unidentified in standard database searches, are candidates for more intensive search strategies. Using a well studied public dataset we also show that a high proportion (83.9%) of the spectra predicted by msmsEval to be of high quality but that elude standard search strategies, are in fact interpretable. CONCLUSION: msmsEval will be useful for high-throughput proteomics projects and is freely available for download from . Supports Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/Unix operating systems

Computational analysis of unassigned high-quality MS/MS spectra in proteomic data sets

In a typical shotgun proteomics experiment, a significant number of high-quality MS/MS spectra remain “unassigned.” The main focus of this work is to improve our understanding of various sources of unassigned high-quality spectra. To achieve this, we designed an iterative computational approach for more efficient interrogation of MS/MS data. The method involves multiple stages of database searching with different search parameters, spectral library searching, blind searching for modified peptides, and genomic database searching. The method is applied to a large publicly available shotgun proteomic data set.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/77526/1/2712_ftp.pd

MOD(i) : a powerful and convenient web server for identifying multiple post-translational peptide modifications from tandem mass spectra

MOD(i) () is a powerful and convenient web service that facilitates the interpretation of tandem mass spectra for identifying post-translational modifications (PTMs) in a peptide. It is powerful in that it can interpret a tandem mass spectrum even when hundreds of modification types are considered and the number of potential PTMs in a peptide is large, in contrast to most of the methods currently available for spectra interpretation that limit the number of PTM sites and types being used for PTM analysis. For example, using MOD(i), one can consider for analysis both the entire PTM list published on the unimod webpage () and user-defined PTMs simultaneously, and one can also identify multiple PTM sites in a spectrum. MOD(i) is convenient in that it can take various input file formats such as .mzXML, .dta, .pkl and .mgf files, and it is equipped with a graphical tool called MassPective developed to display MOD(i)'s output in a user-friendly manner and helps users understand MOD(i)'s output quickly. In addition, one can perform manual de novo sequencing using MassPective

Current challenges in software solutions for mass spectrometry-based quantitative proteomics

This work was in part supported by the PRIME-XS project, grant agreement number 262067, funded by the European Union seventh Framework Programme; The Netherlands Proteomics Centre, embedded in The Netherlands Genomics Initiative; The Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre; and the Centre for Biomedical Genetics (to S.C., B.B. and A.J.R.H); by NIH grants NCRR RR001614 and RR019934 (to the UCSF Mass Spectrometry Facility, director: A.L. Burlingame, P.B.); and by grants from the MRC, CR-UK, BBSRC and Barts and the London Charity (to P.C.

Computational Strategies for Proteogenomics Analyses

Proteogenomics is an area of proteomics concerning the detection of novel peptides and peptide variants nominated by genomics and transcriptomics experiments. While the term primarily refers to studies utilizing a customized protein database derived from select sequencing experiments, proteogenomics methods can also be applied in the quest for identifying previously unobserved, or missing, proteins in a reference protein database. The identification of novel peptides is difficult and results can be dominated by false positives if conventional computational and statistical approaches for shotgun proteomics are directly applied without consideration of the challenges involved in proteogenomics analyses. In this dissertation, I systematically distill the sources of false positives in peptide identification and present potential remedies, including computational strategies that are necessary to make these approaches feasible for large datasets. In the first part, I analyze high scoring decoys, which are false identifications with high assigned confidences, using multiple peptide identification strategies to understand how they are generated and develop strategies for reducing false positives. I also demonstrate that modified peptides can cause violations in the target-decoy assumptions, which is a cornerstone for error rate estimation in shotgun proteomics, leading to potential underestimation in the number of false positives. Second, I address computational bottlenecks in proteogenomics workflows through the development of two database search engines: EGADS and MSFragger. EGADS aims to address issues relating to the large sequence space involved in proteogenomics studies by using graphical processing units to accelerate both in-silico digestion and similarity scoring. MSFragger implements a novel fragment ion index and searching algorithm that vastly speeds up spectra similarity calculations. For the identification of modified peptides using the open search strategy, MSFragger is over 150X faster than conventional database search tools. Finally, I will discuss refinements to the open search strategy for detecting modified peptides and tools for improved collation and annotation. Using the speed afforded by MSFragger, I perform open searching on several large-scale proteomics experiments, identifying modified peptides on an unprecedented scale and demonstrating its utility in diverse proteomics applications. The ability to rapidly and comprehensively identify modified peptides allows for the reduction of false positives in proteogenomics. It also has implications in discovery proteomics by allowing for the detection of both common and rare (including novel) biological modifications that are often not considered in large scale proteomics experiments. The ability to account for all chemically modified peptides may also improve protein abundance estimates in quantitative proteomics.PHDBioinformaticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138581/1/andykong_1.pd