Project description:Interpreting the potentially vast number of hypotheses generated by a shotgun proteomics experiment requires a valid and accurate procedure for assigning statistical confidence estimates to identified tandem mass spectra. Despite the crucial role such procedures play in most high-throughput proteomics experiments, the scientific literature has not reached a consensus about the best confidence estimation methodology. In this work, we evaluate, using theoretical and empirical analysis, four previously proposed protocols for estimating the false discovery rate (FDR) associated with a set of identified tandem mass spectra: two variants of the target-decoy competition protocol (TDC) of Elias and Gygi and two variants of the separate target-decoy search protocol of Käll et al. Our analysis reveals significant biases in the two separate target-decoy search protocols. Moreover, the one TDC protocol that provides an unbiased FDR estimate among the target PSMs does so at the cost of forfeiting a random subset of high-scoring spectrum identifications. We therefore propose the mix-max procedure to provide unbiased, accurate FDR estimates in the presence of well-calibrated scores. The method avoids biases associated with the two separate target-decoy search protocols and also avoids the propensity for target-decoy competition to discard a random subset of high-scoring target identifications.
Project description:MotivationAccurate estimation of false discovery rate (FDR) of spectral identification is a central problem in mass spectrometry-based proteomics. Over the past two decades, target-decoy approaches (TDAs) and decoy-free approaches (DFAs) have been widely used to estimate FDR. TDAs use a database of decoy species to faithfully model score distributions of incorrect peptide-spectrum matches (PSMs). DFAs, on the other hand, fit two-component mixture models to learn the parameters of correct and incorrect PSM score distributions. While conceptually straightforward, both approaches lead to problems in practice, particularly in experiments that push instrumentation to the limit and generate low fragmentation-efficiency and low signal-to-noise-ratio spectra.ResultsWe introduce a new decoy-free framework for FDR estimation that generalizes present DFAs while exploiting more search data in a manner similar to TDAs. Our approach relies on multi-component mixtures, in which score distributions corresponding to the correct PSMs, best incorrect PSMs and second-best incorrect PSMs are modeled by the skew normal family. We derive EM algorithms to estimate parameters of these distributions from the scores of best and second-best PSMs associated with each experimental spectrum. We evaluate our models on multiple proteomics datasets and a HeLa cell digest case study consisting of more than a million spectra in total. We provide evidence of improved performance over existing DFAs and improved stability and speed over TDAs without any performance degradation. We propose that the new strategy has the potential to extend beyond peptide identification and reduce the need for TDA on all analytical platforms.Availabilityand implementationhttps://github.com/shawn-peng/FDR-estimation.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Project description:MotivationCross-linking tandem mass spectrometry (XL-MS/MS) is an established analytical platform used to determine distance constraints between residues within a protein or from physically interacting proteins, thus improving our understanding of protein structure and function. To aid biological discovery with XL-MS/MS, it is essential that pairs of chemically linked peptides be accurately identified, a process that requires: (i) database search, that creates a ranked list of candidate peptide pairs for each experimental spectrum and (ii) false discovery rate (FDR) estimation, that determines the probability of a false match in a group of top-ranked peptide pairs with scores above a given threshold. Currently, the only available FDR estimation mechanism in XL-MS/MS is the target-decoy approach (TDA). However, despite its simplicity, TDA has both theoretical and practical limitations that impact the estimation accuracy and increase run time over potential decoy-free approaches (DFAs).ResultsWe introduce a novel decoy-free framework for FDR estimation in XL-MS/MS. Our approach relies on multi-sample mixtures of skew normal distributions, where the latent components correspond to the scores of correct peptide pairs (both peptides identified correctly), partially incorrect peptide pairs (one peptide identified correctly, the other incorrectly), and incorrect peptide pairs (both peptides identified incorrectly). To learn these components, we exploit the score distributions of first- and second-ranked peptide-spectrum matches for each experimental spectrum and subsequently estimate FDR using a novel expectation-maximization algorithm with constraints. We evaluate the method on ten datasets and provide evidence that the proposed DFA is theoretically sound and a viable alternative to TDA owing to its good performance in terms of accuracy, variance of estimation, and run time.Availability and implementationhttps://github.com/shawn-peng/xlms.
Project description:We present a method for FDR estimation of mass spectral library search identifications made by a recently developed method for peptide identification, the hybrid search, based on an extension of the target-decoy approach. In addition to estimating confidence for a given identification, this allows users to compare and integrate identifications from the hybrid mass spectral library search method with other peptide identification methods, such as a sequence database-based method. In addition to a score, each hybrid score is associated with a "DeltaMass" value, which is the difference in mass of the search and library peptide, which can correspond to the mass of a modification. We explored the relation between FDR and DeltaMass using 100 concatenated random decoy libraries and discovered that a small number of DeltaMass values were especially likely to result from decoy searches. Using these values, FDR values could be adjusted for these specific values and a reliable FDR generated for any DeltaMass value. Finally, using this method, we find and examine common, reliable identifications made by the hybrid search for a range of proteomic studies.
Project description:False discovery rate (FDR) estimation is a cornerstone of proteomics that has recently been adapted to cross-linking/mass spectrometry. Here we demonstrate that heterobifunctional cross-linkers, while theoretically different from homobifunctional cross-linkers, need not be considered separately in practice. We develop and then evaluate the impact of applying a correct FDR formula for use of heterobifunctional cross-linkers and conclude that there are minimal practical advantages. Hence a single formula can be applied to data generated from the many different non-cleavable cross-linkers.
Project description:BackgroundFalse discovery rate (FDR) estimation is very important in proteomics. The target-decoy strategy (TDS), which is often used for FDR estimation, estimates the FDR under the assumption that when spectra are identified incorrectly, the probabilities of the spectra matching the target or decoy peptides are identical. However, no spectra matching target or decoy peptide probabilities are identical. We propose cTDS (target-decoy strategy with candidate peptides) for accurate estimation of the FDR using the probability that the spectrum is identified incorrectly as a target or decoy peptide.ResultsMost spectrum cases result in a probability of having the spectrum identified incorrectly as a target or decoy peptide of close to 0.5, but only about 1.14-4.85% of the total spectra have an exact probability of 0.5. We used an entrapment sequence method to demonstrate the accuracy of cTDS. For fixed FDR thresholds (1-10%), the false match rate (FMR) in cTDS is closer than the FMR in TDS. We compared the number of peptide-spectrum matches (PSMs) obtained with TDS and cTDS at a 1% FDR threshold with the HEK293 dataset. In the first and third replications, the number of PSMs obtained with cTDS for the reverse, pseudo-reverse, shuffle, and de Bruijn databases exceeded those obtained with TDS (about 0.001-0.132%), with the pseudo-shuffle database containing less compared to TDS (about 0.05-0.126%). In the second replication, the number of PSMs obtained with cTDS for all databases exceeds that obtained with TDS (about 0.013-0.274%).ConclusionsWhen spectra are actually identified incorrectly, most probabilities of the spectra matching a target or decoy peptide are not identical. Therefore, we propose cTDS, which estimates the FDR more accurately using the probability of the spectrum being identified incorrectly as a target or decoy peptide.
Project description:BackgroundOne of the most important steps in peptide identification is to estimate the false discovery rate (FDR). The most commonly used method for estimating FDR is the target-decoy search strategy (TDS). While this method is simple and effective, it is time/space-inefficient because it searches a database that is twice as large as the original protein database. This inefficiency problem becomes more evident as protein databases get bigger and bigger. We propose a target-small decoy search strategy and present a rigorous verification that it reduces the database size and search time while retaining the accuracy of target-decoy search strategy (TDS).ResultsWe show that peptide spectrum matches (PSMs) obtained at 1% FDR in TDS overlap ~ 99% with those in our method. (Considering that 1% FDR is used, 99% overlap means our method is very accurate.) Moreover, our method is more time/space-efficient than TDS. The search time of our method is reduced to only 1/4 of that of TDS when UniProt and its 1/8 decoy database are used.ConclusionsWe demonstrate that our method is almost as accurate as TDS and more time/space-efficient than TDS. Since the efficiency of our method is more evident as the database size increases, our method is expected to be useful for identifying peptides in proteogenomics databases constructed from inflated databases using genomic data.
Project description:BackgroundIn the context of genomic association studies, for which a large number of statistical tests are performed simultaneously, the local False Discovery Rate (lFDR), which quantifies the evidence of a specific gene association with a clinical or biological variable of interest, is a relevant criterion for taking into account the multiple testing problem. The lFDR not only allows an inference to be made for each gene through its specific value, but also an estimate of Benjamini-Hochberg's False Discovery Rate (FDR) for subsets of genes.ResultsIn the framework of estimating procedures without any distributional assumption under the alternative hypothesis, a new and efficient procedure for estimating the lFDR is described. The results of a simulation study indicated good performances for the proposed estimator in comparison to four published ones. The five different procedures were applied to real datasets.ConclusionA novel and efficient procedure for estimating lFDR was developed and evaluated.
Project description:We discuss the identification of genes that are associated with an outcome in RNA sequencing and other sequence-based comparative genomic experiments. RNA-sequencing data take the form of counts, so models based on the Gaussian distribution are unsuitable. Moreover, normalization is challenging because different sequencing experiments may generate quite different total numbers of reads. To overcome these difficulties, we use a log-linear model with a new approach to normalization. We derive a novel procedure to estimate the false discovery rate (FDR). Our method can be applied to data with quantitative, two-class, or multiple-class outcomes, and the computation is fast even for large data sets. We study the accuracy of our approaches for significance calculation and FDR estimation, and we demonstrate that our method has potential advantages over existing methods that are based on a Poisson or negative binomial model. In summary, this work provides a pipeline for the significance analysis of sequencing data.
Project description:Within the last several years, top-down proteomics has emerged as a high throughput technique for protein and proteoform identification. This technique has the potential to identify and characterize thousands of proteoforms within a single study, but the absence of accurate false discovery rate (FDR) estimation could hinder the adoption and consistency of top-down proteomics in the future. In automated identification and characterization of proteoforms, FDR calculation strongly depends on the context of the search. The context includes MS data quality, the database being interrogated, the search engine, and the parameters of the search. Particular to top-down proteomics-there are four molecular levels of study: proteoform spectral match (PrSM), protein, isoform, and proteoform. Here, a context-dependent framework for calculating an accurate FDR at each level was designed, implemented, and validated against a manually curated training set with 546 confirmed proteoforms. We examined several search contexts and found that an FDR calculated at the PrSM level under-reported the true FDR at the protein level by an average of 24-fold. We present a new open-source tool, the TDCD_FDR_Calculator, which provides a scalable, context-dependent FDR calculation that can be applied post-search to enhance the quality of results in top-down proteomics from any search engine.