Mascot: The trusted reference standard for protein identification by mass spectrometry for 25 years

Blog

Articles tagged: artefact

Return to blog archive

Posted by John Cottrell (October 16, 2017)

Step away from the iodoacetamide

In our July newsletter, we featured a paper from Torsten Müller and Dominic Winter, University of Bonn, concerning alkylation artefacts. Some of their findings were quite shocking. For example, differences of more than 9 fold in numbers of identified methionine-containing peptides for in-gel digested samples between iodine- and non-iodine-containing alkylation reagents. This is important because a glance at the literature [...]

Full article and comments form

Posted by John Cottrell (July 12, 2017)

The most analysed protein is …

Trypsin, of course. The Journal of Proteome Research has a paper from the Medical University of Graz concerning the importance of correctly identifying spectra from contaminant proteins. In particular, trypsin autolysis peptides. The authors point out that sequencing grade trypsin is modified by methylation or acetylation of the lysines, to inhibit autolysis. Unless these variable modifications are selected in a [...]

Full article and comments form

Posted by John Cottrell (November 22, 2013)

Does protein FDR have any meaning?

Its easy to grasp the concept of using a target/decoy search to estimate peptide false discovery rate. You search against a decoy database where there are no true matches available, so the number of observed matches provides a good estimate of the number of false matches in the results from the target. People debate implementation details, such as whether the [...]

Full article and comments form