Mass fingerprinting of complex mixtures: protein inference from high-resolution peptide masses and predicted retention times.

In typical shotgun experiments, the mass spectrometer records the masses of a large set of ionized analytes but fragments only a fraction of them. In the subsequent analyses, normally only the fragmented ions are used to compile a set of peptide identifications, while the unfragmented ones are disregarded. In this work, we show how the unfragmented ions, here denoted MS1-features, can be used to increase the confidence of the proteins identified in shotgun experiments. Specifically, we propose the usage of in silico mass tags, where the observed MS1-features are matched against de novo predicted masses and retention times for all peptides derived from a sequence database. We present a statistical model to assign protein-level probabilities based on the MS1-features and combine this data with the fragmentation spectra. Our approach was evaluated for two triplicate data sets from yeast and human, respectively, leading to up to 7% more protein identifications at a fixed protein-level false discovery rate of 1%. The additional protein identifications were validated both in the context of the mass spectrometry data and by examining their estimated transcript levels generated using RNA-Seq. The proposed method is reproducible, straightforward to apply, and can even be used to reanalyze and increase the yield of existing data sets.

Structural alterations from multiple displacement amplification of a human genome revealed by mate-pair sequencing.

Comprehensive identification of the acquired mutations that cause common cancers will require genomic analyses of large sets of tumor samples. Typically, the tissue material available from tumor specimens is limited, which creates a demand for accurate template amplification. We therefore evaluated whether phi29-mediated whole genome amplification introduces false positive structural mutations by massive mate-pair sequencing of a normal human genome before and after such amplification. Multiple displacement amplification led to a decrease in clone coverage and an increase by two orders of magnitude in the prevalence of inversions, but did not increase the prevalence of translocations. While multiple strand displacement amplification may find uses in translocation analyses, it is likely that alternative amplification strategies need to be developed to meet the demands of cancer genomics.

Global analysis of mRNA stability in the archaeon Sulfolobus.

BACKGROUND: Transcript half-lives differ between organisms, and between groups of genes within the same organism. The mechanisms underlying these differences are not clear, nor are the biochemical properties that determine the stability of a transcript. To address these issues, genome-wide mRNA decay studies have been conducted in eukaryotes and bacteria. In contrast, relatively little is known about RNA stability in the third domain of life, Archaea. Here, we present a microarray-based analysis of mRNA half-lives in the hyperthermophilic crenarchaea Sulfolobus solfataricus and Sulfolobus acidocaldarius, constituting the first genome-wide study of RNA decay in archaea. RESULTS: The two transcriptomes displayed similar half-life distributions, with medians of about five minutes. Growth-related genes, such as those involved in transcription, translation and energy production, were over-represented among unstable transcripts, whereas uncharacterized genes were over-represented among the most stable. Half-life was negatively correlated with transcript abundance and, unlike the situation in other organisms, also negatively correlated with transcript length. CONCLUSION: The mRNA half-life distribution of Sulfolobus species is similar to those of much faster growing bacteria, contrasting with the earlier observation that median mRNA half-life is proportional to the minimal length of the cell cycle. Instead, short half-lives may be a general feature of prokaryotic transcriptomes, possibly related to the absence of a nucleus and/or more limited post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms. The pattern of growth-related transcripts being among the least stable in Sulfolobus may also indicate that the short half-lives reflect a necessity to rapidly reprogram gene expression upon sudden changes in environmental conditions.