No abstract

The results illustrate a broad applicability of the metric based on shared tandem mass spectra between LC/MS/MS datasets for analysing protein digests in different types of experiments. There is no reason to assume that our instance of this method is optimal in any of these situations, as it makes limited or no use of accurate mass and chromatographic retention time. We propose that with further improvement and refinement, this type of analysis can be applied as a simple but informative first step in many pipelines for bottom-up tandem mass spectrometry data analysis in proteomics and other fields, comparing or analysing large numbers of samples or datasets.