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Articles tagged: modification
Error tolerant searches now show statistical significance
The latest release of Mascot Server introduces some important changes to error tolerant searches. Matches from the second pass search now have expect values attached, indicating confidence levels. These are either estimates based on counting trials or empirical values derived from searching a decoy database. If you are not familiar with the error tolerant search, now is the time to [...]
Variable Modifications in Mascot 2.7
Most protein samples will exhibit some degree of modification which needs to be considered when carrying out a database search In this article we’ll take a look at some important changes we introduced in Mascot 2.7 in how Mascot handles variable modifications. Variable modification permutation in Mascot 2.6 and earlier In Mascot 2.6 or earlier, variable modification permutation is handled [...]
Disulfide bond characterisation
Support for matching crosslinked peptides is a new feature in Mascot Server 2.7. The following linkage types can be detected: intralinks – the linked peptides are from the same protein interlinks – the linked peptides are from two different proteins looplinks – connecting two amino acids within a single peptide monolinks – a linker with one end attached and the [...]
Results round-up for the ‘dark matter’ challenge
In June, we tried to harness the power of crowd-sourcing to explain some of the unidentified modifications found in open database searches. We selected 20 abundant and unassigned mass deltas from Supplementary Table 3 of the recent MSFragger paper from Alexey Nesvizhskii’s group at U. Michigan and offered prizes for the first credible explanations. There were 35 unannotated deltas in [...]
How to create a spectral library for contaminants
An earlier article highlighted how modified and non-specific peptides from contaminants can be matched using a spectral library without increasing the search space for the target proteins. This is particularly useful for sequencing grade trypsin, which is modified by methylation or acetylation of the lysines, creating a large number of modified non-specific peptides that are missed by typical search strategies. [...]
Trying to illuminate proteomics ‘dark matter’
The May 2017 issue of Nature Methods has a paper from Alexey Nesvizhskii’s group at U. Michigan describing a new open database search program called MSFragger. Strikingly, they also observed the two highly abundant but unidentified mass deltas reported in Steven Gygi’s 2015 mass tolerant paper: 301.9864 and 249.9803. The challenges of open searching were discussed in an earlier blog [...]
High FDRs for methylated peptides III
The MCP paper "Large Scale Mass Spectrometry-based Identifications of Enzyme-mediated Protein Methylation Are Subject to High False Discovery Rates" raises some important questions concerning the accuracy and interpretation of database search results. In this third article, we look at the difference between using counts of matches (PSMs) and counts of distinct sequences to calculate the false discovery rate (FDR). filestarget [...]
High FDRs for methylated peptides II
In a previous article, we discussed how the false discovery rate (FDR) for modified peptides would be higher than the global FDR for all PSMs if the proportion of modified peptides in the search space for false matches was higher than for true matches. This is only one factor in the very high FDRs for methylated peptides reported in the [...]
High FDRs for methylated peptides
"Large Scale Mass Spectrometry-based Identifications of Enzyme-mediated Protein Methylation Are Subject to High False Discovery Rates" in the March edition of Molecular & Cellular Proteomics represents a very substantial and systematic piece of work from the University of New South Wales. Three types of sample preparation (coomassie gel, unstained gel, HILIC) were combined with three different ionisation methods (CID, ETD, [...]
Selenocysteine
David Fenyö and Ron Beavis have a short paper in J. Proteome Research that draws attention to a potential problem with peptides containing selenocysteine (1-letter code U, 3-letter code Sec). Samples are frequently alkylated, yet modified U is unlikely to be considered in the search. This need not be an issue for Mascot searches, but you may have no modifications [...]