Relative protein quantitation with post translational modifications in mass spectrometry based proteomics

Mass spectrometry has become the tool of choice for most investigations in proteomics. Identification of proteins from complex mixtures has long been achieved and is now routinely used in countless high throughput studies. Quantitation by mass spectrometry is comparably newer and many different strategies have been proposed. One such strategy quantitates the difference in protein expression level among samples via extracted ion chromatograms, or spectral counts or a combination thereof. Another strategy involves mass modifications of the analytes in one or more of the samples under investigation. MSMAG has been developed as an extension to 2DB and it has been shown that it can aid in quantitation of data from experiments employing label-free quantitation. Recently, it has been extended to allow for analysis of data based on labelling strategies. This also makes it possible to quickly visualize and investigate inherent mass differences as presented by post translational modifications.