PNNL

Abstract

In mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics, accurate estimation of statistical signicance of peptide and protein identications is desired for determining whether they are actually correct. Probabilistic models, such as the generating function method, have been successfully applied to compute statistical signicance of peptide-spectrum matches (PSMs) in bottom-up MS, but it is limited to PSMs of short peptides without post-translational modications (PTMs). Recently, top-down MS has be- come available in many laboratories, which often identies intact proteins with PTMs. In this paper, we propose an extended generating function (EGF) method for accurately computing statistical signicance of protein- spectrum matches (PrSMs) with PTMs.