Improved protein identification using automated high mass measurement accuracy MALDI FT-ICR MS peptide mass fingerprinting

A comparison between automated peptide mass fingerprinting systems using MALDI-TOF and MALDI FT-ICR MS is presented using 86 overexpressed proteins from Thermotoga maritima. The high mass measurement accuracy of FT-ICR MS greatly reduces the probability of an incorrect assignment of a protein in peptide mass fingerprinting by significantly decreasing the score and peptide sequence coverage of the highest ranked random protein match from the database. This improved mass accuracy led to the identification of all 86 proteins with the FT-ICR data versus 84 proteins using the TOF data against the T. maritima database. The beneficial effect of mass accuracy becomes much more evident with the addition of variable modifications and an increase in the size of the database used in the search. A search of the same data against the T. maritima database with the addition of a variable modification resulted in 77 identifications using MALDI-TOF and 84 identifications using MALDI FT-ICR MS. When searching the NCBInr database, the FT-ICR based system identified 82 of 86 proteins while the TOF based system could only identify 73. The MALDI FT-ICR based system has the further advantage of producing fewer unassigned masses in each peptide mass fingerprint, resulting in greatly reduced sequence coverage and score for the highest ranked random match and improving confidence in the correctly assigned top scoring protein. Finally, the use of rms error as a measure for instrumental mass accuracy is discussed.