PILOT-PROTEIN: Identification of unmodified and modified proteins via high-resolution mass spectrometry and mixed-integer linear optimization

A novel protein identification framework, PILOT-PROTEIN, has been developed to construct a comprehensive list of all unmodified proteins that are present in a living sample. It uses the peptide identification results from the PILOT-SEQUEL algorithm to initially determine all unmodified proteins within the sample. Using a rigorous biclustering approach that groups incorrect peptide sequences with other homologous sequences, the number of false positives reported is minimized. A sequence tag procedure is then incorporated along with the untargeted PTM identification algorithm, PILOT-PTM, to determine a list of all modification types and sites for each protein. The unmodified protein identification algorithm, PILOT-PROTEIN, is compared to the methods SEQUEST, InsPecT, X!Tandem, VEMS, and ProteinProspector using both prepared protein samples and a more complex chromatin digest. The algorithm demonstrates superior protein identification accuracy with a lower false positive rate. All materials are freely available to the scientific community at http://pumpd.princeton.edu.