TRIC: an automated alignment strategy for reproducible protein quantification in targeted proteomics

HL Röst, Y Liu, G D'Agostino, M Zanella, P Navarro… - Nature …, 2016 - nature.com
Nature methods, 2016nature.com
Next-generation mass spectrometric (MS) techniques such as SWATH-MS have
substantially increased the throughput and reproducibility of proteomic analysis, but
ensuring consistent quantification of thousands of peptide analytes across multiple liquid
chromatography–tandem MS (LC-MS/MS) runs remains a challenging and laborious
manual process. To produce highly consistent and quantitatively accurate proteomics data
matrices in an automated fashion, we developed TRIC (http://proteomics. ethz. ch/tric/), a …
Abstract
Next-generation mass spectrometric (MS) techniques such as SWATH-MS have substantially increased the throughput and reproducibility of proteomic analysis, but ensuring consistent quantification of thousands of peptide analytes across multiple liquid chromatography–tandem MS (LC-MS/MS) runs remains a challenging and laborious manual process. To produce highly consistent and quantitatively accurate proteomics data matrices in an automated fashion, we developed TRIC (http://proteomics.ethz.ch/tric/), a software tool that utilizes fragment-ion data to perform cross-run alignment, consistent peak-picking and quantification for high-throughput targeted proteomics. TRIC reduced the identification error compared to a state-of-the-art SWATH-MS analysis without alignment by more than threefold at constant recall while correcting for highly nonlinear chromatographic effects. On a pulsed-SILAC experiment performed on human induced pluripotent stem cells, TRIC was able to automatically align and quantify thousands of light and heavy isotopic peak groups. Thus, TRIC fills a gap in the pipeline for automated analysis of massively parallel targeted proteomics data sets.
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