Optimal selection of epitopes for TXP-immunoaffinity mass spectrometry.
BACKGROUND
Mass spectrometry (MS) based protein profiling has become one of the key technologies in biomedical research and biomarker discovery. One bottleneck in MS-based protein analysis is sample preparation and an efficient fractionation step to reduce the complexity of the biological samples, which are too complex to be analyzed directly with MS. Sample preparation strategies that reduce the complexity of tryptic digests by using immunoaffinity based methods have shown to lead to a substantial increase in throughput and sensitivity in the proteomic mass spectrometry approach. The limitation of using such immunoaffinity-based approaches is the availability of the appropriate peptide specific capture antibodies. Recent developments in these approaches, where subsets of peptides with short identical terminal sequences can be enriched using antibodies directed against short terminal epitopes, promise a significant gain in efficiency.


RESULTS
We show that the minimal set of terminal epitopes for the coverage of a target protein list can be found by the formulation as a set cover problem, preceded by a filtering pipeline for the exclusion of peptides and target epitopes with undesirable properties.


CONCLUSIONS
For small datasets (a few hundred proteins) it is possible to solve the problem to optimality with moderate computational effort using commercial or free solvers. Larger datasets, like full proteomes require the use of heuristics.
Planatscher
Hannes
H
University of Tübingen, Center for Bioinformatics, Sand 1, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany. hannes.planatscher@uni-tuebingen.de.
Supper
Jochen
J
Poetz
Oliver
O
Stoll
Dieter
D
Joos
Thomas
T
Templin
Markus F
MF
Zell
Andreas
A