Protein Sequencing with an Adaptive Genetic Algorithm from Tandem Mass Spectrometry

In Proteomics, only the de novo peptide sequencing approach allows a partial amino acid sequence of a peptide to be found from a MS/MS spectrum. In this article a preliminary work is presented to discover a complete protein sequence from spectral data (MS and MS/MS spectra). For the moment, our approach only uses MS spectra. A genetic algorithm (GA) has been designed with a new evaluation function which works directly with a complete MS spectrum as input and not with a mass list like the other methods using this kind of data. Thus the mono isotopic peak extraction step which needs a human intervention is deleted. The goal of this approach is to discover the sequence of unknown proteins and to allow a better understanding of the differences between experimental proteins and proteins from databases.