The accuracy of statistical confidence estimates in shotgun proteomics

TL;DRAbstract

High-throughput techniques are currently some of the most promising methods to study molecular biology, with the potential to improve medicine and enable new biological applications. In proteomics, the large scale study of proteins, the leading method is mass spectrometry. At present researchers can routinely identify and quantify thousands of proteins in a single experiment with the technique called shotgun proteomics. A challenge of these experiments is the computational analysis and the interpretation of the mass spectra. A shotgun proteomics experiment easily generates tens of thousands of spectra, each thought to represent a peptide from a protein. Due to the immense biological and technical complexity, however, our computational tools often misinterpret these spectra and derive incorrect peptides. As a consequence, the biological interpretation of the experiment relies heavily on the statistical confidence that we estimate for the identifications. In this thesis, I have included

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