Phoenix Enhancer: proteomics data mining using clustered spectra

Abstract

Motivation: Spectrum clustering has been used to enhance proteomics data analysis: some originally unidentified spectra can potentially be identified and individual peptides can be evaluated to find potential mis-identifications by using clusters of identified spectra. The Phoenix Enhancer provides an infrastructure to analyze tandem mass spectra and the corre-sponding peptides in the context of previously identified public data. Based on PRIDE Cluster data and a newly developed pipeline, four functionalities are provided: i) evaluate the original peptide identifications in an individual dataset, to find low confidence peptide spectrum matches (PSMs) which could correspond to mis-identifications; ii) provide confidence scores for all originally identified PSMs, to help users evaluate their quality (complementary to getting a global false dis-covery rate); iii) identify potential new PSMs for originally unidentified spectra; and iv) provide a collection of browsing and visualization tools to analyze and export the results. In addition to the web based service, the code is open-source and easy to re-deploy on local computers using Docker containers.

Footnotes

* English writing revised; author affiliations updated; Subsection "Benchmark datasets" updated to correct the representation. Figure 1 revised; Supplemental files updated.

* http://enhancer.ncpsb.org