Spatial proteomics has the potential to significantly advance our understanding of biology, physiology and medicine. Dr George Guo, Deptartment of Physiology and University of Auckland Mass Spectrometry Hub has recently published his software package to automatically annotate spatial proteomic mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) data in the journal ‘Nature Communications’.
“HIT-MAP” is an open-source bioinformatics workflow using peptide mass fingerprint analysis and a dual scoring system to computationally assign peptide and protein annotations to high mass resolution MSI datasets and generate customisable spatial distribution maps. This software addresses one of the current limitations in MSI spatial proteomics of assigning protein identification for the hundreds to thousands of signals typically detected in a single MSI dataset. HIT-MAP will be a valuable resource for the spatial proteomics community for analysing newly generated and retrospective datasets, enabling robust peptide and protein annotation and visualisation in a wide array of normal and disease contexts.
This work was a collaboration between the University of Auckland, the Garvan Institute for Medical Research, and Vanderbilt University. We acknowledge support from the UoA Mass Spectrometry Hub, the Health Research Council of NZ, and the FMHS post-doctoral society for publication support.
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