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Updated: May 11, 2026
Quantitative Analysis of Chromatin Proteomes in Disease
Published on: December 28, 2012
A combinatorial approach to the peptide feature matching problem for label-free quantification
1David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1.
Motivation:
Label-free quantification is an important approach to identify biomarkers, as it measures the quantity change of peptides across different biological samples. One of the fundamental steps for label-free quantification is to match the peptide features that are detected in two datasets to each other. Although ad hoc software tools exist for the feature matching, the definition of a combinatorial model for this problem is still not available.
Results:
A combinatorial model is proposed in this article. Each peptide feature contains a mass value and a retention time value, which are used to calculate a matching weight between a pair of features. The feature matching is to find the maximum-weighted matching between the two sets of features, after applying a to-be-computed time alignment function to all the retention time values of one set of the features. This is similar to the maximum matching problem in a bipartite graph. But we show that the requirement of time alignment makes the problem NP-hard. Practical algorithms are also provided. Experiments on real data show that the algorithm compares favorably with other existing methods.
Contact:
binma@uwaterloo.ca
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
