UC San Diego

In high-throughput proteomics the development of computational methods and novel experimental strategies often rely on each other. In several areas, mass spectrometry methods for data acquisition are ahead of computational methods to interpret the resulting tandem mass (MS/MS) spectra. While there are numerous situations where two or more peptides are co-fragmented in the same MS/MS spectrum, nearly all mainstream computational approaches still make the ubiquitous assumption that each MS/MS spectrum comes from only one peptide. In this thesis we addressed problems in three emerging areas where computational tools that relax the above assumption are crucial for the success application of these approaches on a large-scale. In the first chapter we describe algorithms for the identification of mixture spectra that are from more than one co-eluting peptide precursors. The ability to interpret mixture spectra not only improves peptide identification in traditional data-dependent-acquisition (DDA) workflows but is also crucial for the success application of emerging data-independent-acquisition (DIA) techniques that have the potential to greatly improve the throughput of peptide identification. In chapter two, we address the problem of identification of peptides with complex post-translational modification (PTM). Detection of PTMs is important to understand the functional dynamics of proteins. Complex PTMs resulted from the conjugation of another macromolecule onto the substrate protein. The resultant modified peptides not only generate spectrum that contains a mixture of fragment ions from both the PTM and the substrate peptide but they also display substantially different fragmentation patterns as compared to conventional, unmodified peptides. We describe a hybrid experimental and computational approach to build search tools that capture the specific fragmentation patterns of modified peptides. Finally in chapter three we address the problem of identification of linked peptides. Linked peptides are two peptides that are covalently linked together. The generation and identification of linked peptides has recently been demonstrated to be a versatile tool to study protein-protein interactions and protein structures, however the identification of linked peptides face many challenges. We integrate lessons learned in the previous chapters to build an efficient and sensitive tool to identify linked peptides from MS/MS spectra