A statistical approach to peptide identification from clustered tandem mass spectrometry data

Tandem mass spectrometry experiments generate from thousands to millions of spectra. These spectra can be used to identify the presence of proteins in biological samples. In this work, we propose a new method to identify peptides, substrings of proteins, based on clustered tandem mass spectrometry data. In contrast to previously proposed approaches, which identify one representative spectrum for each cluster using traditional database searching algorithms, our method uses all available information to score all the spectra in a cluster against candidate peptides using Bayesian model selection. We illustrate the performance of our method by applying it to seven-standard-protein mixture data.