Software for postprocessing of shotgun proteomics data
Description
The first step in analyzing an mass spectrometry assay is to match
the harvested spectra against a target database
using database search engines such as Sequest and Mascot,
a process that renders list of peptide-spectrum matches.
However, it is not trivial to assess the accuracy
of these identifications.
Percolator uses a semi-supervised machine learning to
discriminate correct from incorrect peptide-spectrum matches,
and calculates accurate statistics such as q-value (FDR)
and posterior error probabilities.