Expanding tandem mass spectral libraries of phosphorylated peptides: advances and applications

The identification of phosphorylated proteins remains a challenge in proteomics, partially due to the difficulty in assigning tandem mass (MS/MS) spectra to their originating peptide sequences with correct phosphosite localization. Because of its advantages in efficiency and sensitivity, spectral library searching is a promising alternative to conventional sequence database searching. Our work aims to construct the largest collision-induced dissociation (CID) MS/MS spectral libraries of phosphorylated peptides in human (Homo sapiens) and four model organisms (Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Mus musculus) to date, to facilitate phosphorylated peptide identification by spectral library searching. We employed state-of-the-art search methods to published data and applied two recently published phosphorylation site localization tools (PhosphoRS and PTMProphet) to ascertain the phosphorylation sites. To further increase the coverage of this library, we predicted "semi-empirical" spectra for peptides containing known phosphorylation sites from the corresponding template unphosphorylated peptide spectra. The performance of the spectral libraries built were evaluated and found to be superior to conventional database searching in terms of sensitivity. Updated spectral libraries of phosphorylated peptides are made freely available for use with the spectral search engine SpectraST. The work flow being developed will be used to continuously update the libraries when new data become available.