Improvement of peptide identification with considering the abundance of mRNA and peptide

BACKGROUND: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) followed by database search is a main approach to identify peptides/proteins in proteomic studies. A lot of effort has been devoted to improve the identification accuracy and sensitivity for peptides/proteins, such as developing advanced algorithms and expanding protein databases. RESULTS: Herein, we described a new strategy for enhancing the sensitivity of protein/peptide identification through combination of mRNA and peptide abundance in Percolator. In our strategy, a new workflow for peptide identification is established on the basis of the abundance of transcripts and potential novel transcripts derived from RNA-Seq and abundance of peptides towards the same life species. We demonstrate the utility of this strategy by two MS/MS datasets and the results indicate that about 5% ~ 8% improvement of peptide identification can be achieved with 1% FDR in peptide level by integrating the peptide abundance, the transcript abundance and potential novel transcripts from RNA-Seq data. Meanwhile, 181 and 154 novel peptides were identified in the two datasets, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: We have demonstrated that this strategy could enable improvement of peptide/protein identification and discovery of novel peptides, as compared with the traditional search methods. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-017-1491-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.