Proteomics: mass spectrometry

Mass spectrometry (MS) is an analytic technique that produces the mass-to-charge ratio spectra of peptide fragments in samples. Typically, samples contain mainly purified proteins or mixtures representing biological specimens. Unlike genome and transcriptome data where clear guidelines are set, there is no requirement for publishing the unprocessed data of proteomics MS experiments. For complex protein samples, peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) is not feasible or results too many false outputs. In those cases, the solution is the application of tandem MS spectra, or in other terms MS/MS-based peptide identification. One of the important uses of MS in proteomics is to measure changes in protein amounts between biological samples. The Human Protein Atlas (HPA) is a collection of data about proteomes in different healthy and disease-affected tissues. It contains interesting and important reference data produced by antibody staining and microscopy.