Amino acid sequence assignment from single molecule peptide sequencing data using a two-stage classifier

We present a machine learning-based interpretive framework (whatprot) for analyzing single molecule protein sequencing data produced by fluorosequencing, a recently developed proteomics technology that determines sparse amino acid sequences for many individual peptide molecules in a highly parallelized fashion. Whatprot uses Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to represent the states of each peptide undergoing the various chemical processes during fluorosequencing, and applies these in a Bayesian classifier, in combination with pre-filtering by a k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) classifier trained on large volumes of simulated fluorosequencing data. We have found that by combining the HMM based Bayesian classifier with the kNN pre-filter, we are able to retain the benefits of both, achieving both tractable runtimes and acceptable precision and recall for identifying peptides and their parent proteins from complex mixtures, outperforming the capabilities of either classifier on its own. Whatprot’s hybrid kNN-HMM approach enables the efficient interpretation of fluorosequencing data using a full proteome reference database and should now also enable improved sequencing error rate estimates.