Protein inference: A protein quantification perspective.

In mass spectrometry-based shotgun proteomics, protein quantification and protein identification are two major computational problems. To quantify the protein abundance, a list of proteins must be firstly inferred from the raw data. Then the relative or absolute protein abundance is estimated with quantification methods, such as spectral counting. Until now, most researchers have been dealing with these two processes separately. In fact, the protein inference problem can be regarded as a special protein quantification problem in the sense that truly present proteins are those proteins whose abundance values are not zero. Some recent published papers have conceptually discussed this possibility. However, there is still a lack of rigorous experimental studies to test this hypothesis. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using protein quantification methods to solve the protein inference problem. Protein inference methods aim to determine whether each candidate protein is present in the sample or not. Protein quantification methods estimate the abundance value of each inferred protein. Naturally, the abundance value of an absent protein should be zero. Thus, we argue that the protein inference problem can be viewed as a special protein quantification problem in which one protein is considered to be present if its abundance is not zero. Based on this idea, our paper tries to use three simple protein quantification methods to solve the protein inference problem effectively. The experimental results on six data sets show that these three methods are competitive with previous protein inference algorithms. This demonstrates that it is plausible to model the protein inference problem as a special protein quantification task, which opens the door of devising more effective protein inference algorithms from a quantification perspective. The source codes of our methods are available at: http://code.google.com/p/protein-inference/.