A honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) PeptideAtlas crossing castes and tissues

Honey bees are a mainstay of agriculture, contributing billions of dollars through their pollination activities. Bees have been a model system for sociality and group behavior for decades but only recently have molecular techniques been brought to study this fascinating and valuable organism. With the release of the first draft of its genome in 2006, proteomics of bees became feasible and over the past five years we have amassed in excess of 5E+6 MS/MS spectra. The lack of a consolidated platform to organize this massive resource hampers our ability, and that of others, to mine the information to its maximum potential.

Here we introduce the Honey Bee PeptideAtlas, a web-based resource for visualizing mass spectrometry data across experiments, providing protein descriptions and Gene Ontology annotations where possible. We anticipate that this will be helpful in planning proteomics experiments, especially in the selection of transitions for selected reaction monitoring. Through a proteogenomics effort, we have used MS/MS data to anchor the annotation of previously undescribed genes and to re-annotate previous gene models in order to improve the current genome annotation.

The Honey Bee PeptideAtlas will contribute to the efficiency of bee proteomics and accelerate our understanding of this species. This publicly accessible and interactive database is an important framework for the current and future analysis of mass spectrometry data.