Bioinformatics-Based Strategies for Rapid Microorganism Identifi cation by Mass Spectrometry

e review approaches for microorganism identifi cation that exploit the wealth of information in constantly expanding proteome databases. Masses of an organism’s protein biomarkers are experimentally determined and matched against sequence-derived masses of proteins, found together with their source organisms in proteome databases. The source organisms are ranked according to the matches, resulting in microorganism identifi cation. Statistical analysis of proteome uniqueness across organisms in a database enables evaluation of the probability of false identifi cations based on protein mass assignments alone. Biomarkers likely to be observed can be identifi ed based solely on microbial genome sequence information. Protein identifi cation methodologies allow assignment of detected proteins to specifi c microorganisms and, by extension, allow identifi cation of the microorganism from which those proteins originate.