Poster #RP113
swissPIT, a multi-tool protein identification platform
Andreas Quandt*, Patricia Hernandez*, Celine Hernandez*, Markus Müller**, Ron Appel*
*Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics; **Institut f. Molekulare Systembiologie
Proteomics experiments produce up to thousands of MSMS spectra per day that are computationally matched to protein or peptide sequences in databases. Ideally, several identification software are applied and the results are merged together. Combining various tools is important for result validation as well as to increase the coverage of identified spectra. Unfortunately, it although increases the number of procedures to be performed and when no automation facilities are available, biologists prefer using one single tool along with a unique parameter setting. In such conditions, a significant number of identifications are simply lost.
The swissPIT platform (www.expasy/tools/swissPIT/) is designed to assist biologists in analysing their MS/MS data with several search engines. Time is saved because the data are uploaded only once and are submitted to one or several MSMS analysis software in parallel. At present time, four tools (Phenyx, X!Tandem, InsPecT and Popitam) are supported. The results can be accessed independently at the end of the runs. New features such as result comparison and merging utilities will soon be added.