Computational and statistical methods for high-throughput analysis of post-translational modifications of proteins

The investigation of post-translational modifications (PTMs) represents one of the main research focuses for the study of protein function and cell signaling. Mass spectrometry instrumentation with increasing sensitivity improved protocols for PTM enrichment and recently established pipelines for high-throughput experiments allow large-scale identification and quantification of several PTM types. This review addresses the concurrently emerging challenges for the computational analysis of the resulting data and presents PTM-centered approaches for spectra identification, statistical analysis, multivariate analysis and data interpretation. We furthermore discuss the potential of future developments that will help to gain deep insight into the PTM-ome and its biological role in cells. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Computational Proteomics.