Mining Mass Spectra for Peptide Facts

The current mainstream software for peptide-centric tandem mass spectrometry data analysis can be categorized as either database-driven, which rely on a library of mass spectra to identify the peptide associated with novel query spectra, or de novo sequencing-based, which aim to find the entire peptide sequence by relying only on the query mass spectrum. While the first paradigm currently produces state-of-the-art results in peptide identification tasks, it does not inherently make use of information present in the query mass spectrum itself to refine identifications. Meanwhile, de novo approaches attempt to solve a complex problem in one go, without any search space constraints in the general case, leading to comparatively poor results. In this paper, we decompose the de novo problem into putatively easier subproblems, and we show that peptide identification rates of database-driven methods may be improved in terms of peptide identification rate by solving one such subsproblem without requiring a solution for the complete de novo task. We demonstrate this using a de novo peptide length prediction task as the chosen subproblem. As a first prototype, we show that a deep learning-based length prediction model increases peptide identification rates in the ProteomeTools dataset as part of an Pepid-based identification pipeline. Using the predicted information to better rank the candidates, we show that combining ideas from the two paradigms produces clear benefits in this setting. We propose that the next generation of peptide-centric tandem mass spectrometry identification methods should combine elements of these paradigms by mining facts "de novo; about the peptide represented in a spectrum, while simultaneously limiting the search space with a peptide candidates database.