Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on November 17, 2007
Bioinformatics 2008 24(2):202-208; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm555
A hierarchical statistical model to assess the confidence of peptides and proteins inferred from tandem mass spectrometry
1Division of Biostatistics, Department of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN 46202 and 2Department of Chemistry, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
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Motivation: Statistical evaluation of the confidence of peptide and protein identifications made by tandem mass spectrometry is a critical component for appropriately interpreting the experimental data and conducting downstream analysis. Although many approaches have been developed to assign confidence measure from different perspectives, a unified statistical framework that integrates the uncertainty of peptides and proteins is still missing.
Results: We developed a hierarchical statistical model (HSM) that jointly models the uncertainty of the identified peptides and proteins and can be applied to any scoring system. With data sets of a standard mixture and the yeast proteome, we demonstrate that the HSM offers a reliable or at least conservative false discovery rate (FDR) estimate for peptide and protein identifications. The probability measure of HSM also offers a powerful discriminating score for peptide identification.
Availability: The algorithm is available upon request from the authors.
Contact: chashen{at}iupui.edu
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Associate Editor: Olga Troyanskaya
Received on June 25, 2007; revised on October 4, 2007; accepted on November 1, 2007