TVNovo: De novo peptide sequencing for high resolution LTQ-FT mass spectrometry using virtual database searching

De novo peptide sequencing is one of the most challenging topics in the field of computational proteomics. In this manuscript, a novel method based on virtual database searching is presented to improve the performance of de novo sequencing for the data from high resolution LTQ-FT mass spectrometry. Our method directly generates a virtual database from each spectrum and applies a search engine to match spectrum against the calculated virtual database. Two datasets from different sources are employed to compare our method to other existing de novo sequencing algorithms and the results show that our method outperforms other methods.