Comparison of False Discovery Rate Control Strategies for Variant Peptide Identifications in Shotgun Proteogenomics

Proteogenomic studies aiming at identification of variant peptides using customized database searches of mass spectrometry data are facing a dilemma of selecting the most efficient database search strategy: A choice has to be made between using combined or sequential searches against reference (wild-type) and mutant protein databases or directly against the mutant database without the wild-type one. Here we called these approaches “all-together”, “one-by-one”, and “direct”, respectively. We share the results of the comparison of these search strategies obtained for large data sets of publicly available proteogenomic data. On the basis of the results of this evaluation, we found that the “all-together” strategy provided, in general, more variant peptide identifications compared with the “one-by-one” approach, while showing similar performance for some specific cases. To validate further the results of this study, we performed a control comparison of the strategies in question using publicly available data for a mixture of the annotated human protein standard UPS1 and E. coli. For these data, both “all-together” and “one-by-one” approaches showed similar sensitivity and specificity of the searches, while the “direct” approach resulted in an increased number of false identifications.