Tandem Mass Spectrum Sequencing: An Alternative to Database Search Engines in Shotgun Proteomics

DNMSO; an ontology for representing de novo sequencing results from Tandem-MS data

For the identification and sequencing of proteins, mass spectrometry (MS) has become the tool of choice and, as such, drives proteomics. MS/MS spectra need to be assigned a peptide sequence for which two strategies exist. Either database search or de novo sequencing can be employed to establish peptide spectrum matches. For database search, mzIdentML is the current community standard for data representation. There is no community standard for representing de novo sequencing results, but we previously proposed the de novo markup language (DNML). At the moment, each de novo sequencing solution uses different data representation, complicating downstream data integration, which is crucial since ensemble predictions may be more useful than predictions of a single tool. We here propose the de novo MS Ontology (DNMSO), which can, for example, provide many-to-many mappings between spectra and peptide predictions. Additionally, an application programming interface (API) that supports any file operation necessary for de novo sequencing from spectra input to reading, writing, creating, of the DNMSO format, as well as conversion from many other file formats, has been implemented. This API removes all overhead from the production of de novo sequencing tools and allows developers to concentrate on algorithm development completely. We make the API and formal descriptions of the format freely available at https://github.com/savastakan/dnmso.

Large Scale Proteomic Data and Network-Based Systems Biology Approaches to Explore the Plant World

The investigation of plant organisms by means of data-derived systems biology approaches based on network modeling is mainly characterized by genomic data, while the potential of proteomics is largely unexplored. This delay is mainly caused by the paucity of plant genomic/proteomic sequences and annotations which are fundamental to perform mass-spectrometry (MS) data interpretation. However, Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques are contributing to filling this gap and an increasing number of studies are focusing on plant proteome profiling and protein-protein interactions (PPIs) identification. Interesting results were obtained by evaluating the topology of PPI networks in the context of organ-associated biological processes as well as plant-pathogen relationships. These examples foreshadow well the benefits that these approaches may provide to plant research. Thus, in addition to providing an overview of the main-omic technologies recently used on plant organisms, we will focus on studies that rely on concepts of module, hub and shortest path, and how they can contribute to the plant discovery processes. In this scenario, we will also consider gene co-expression networks, and some examples of integration with metabolomic data and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to select candidate genes will be mentioned.