Inflect: Optimizing Computational Workflows for Thermal Proteome Profiling Data Analysis

The use of CETSA and Thermal Proteome Profiling (TPP) analytical methods are invaluable for the study of protein-ligand interactions and protein stability in a cellular context. These tools have increasingly been leveraged in work ranging from understanding signaling paradigms to drug discovery. Consequently, there is an important need to optimize the data analysis pipeline that is used to calculate protein melt temperatures (Tm) and relative melt shifts from proteomics abundance data. Here we report a user-friendly analysis of the melt shift calculation workflow where we describe the impact of each individual calculation step on the final output list of stabilized and destabilized proteins. This report also includes a description of how key steps in the analysis workflow quantitatively impacts the list of stabilized/destabilized proteins from an experiment. We applied our findings to develop a more optimized analysis workflow that illustrates the dramatic sensitivity of chosen calculation steps on the final list of reported proteins of interest in a study and will make the R based program Inflect available for research community use. Overall, this work provides an essential resource for scientists as they analyze data from TPP and CETSA experiments and implement their own analysis pipelines geared towards specific applications.