Assigning significance to peptides identified by tandem mass spectrometry using decoy databases

Lukas Käll, John D. Storey, Michael J. MacCoss, William Stafford Noble

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

480 Scopus citations

Abstract

Automated methods for assigning peptides to observed tandem mass spectra typically return a list of peptide-spectrum matches, ranked according to an arbitrary score. In this article, we describe methods for converting these arbitrary scores into more useful statistical significance measures. These methods employ a decoy sequence database as a model of the null hypothesis, and use false discovery rate (FDR) analysis to correct for multiple testing. We first describe a simple FDR inference method and then describe how estimating and taking into account the percentage of incorrectly identified spectra in the entire data set can lead to increased statistical power.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)29-34
Number of pages6
JournalJournal of Proteome Research
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2008
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Chemistry
  • Biochemistry

Keywords

  • Decoy database
  • False discovery rate
  • Peptide identification
  • Statistical significance
  • q-value

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