Research Article MRMPath and MRMutation, Facilitating Discovery of Mass Transitions for Proteotypic Peptides in Biological Pathways Using a Bioinformatics Approach

Copyright © 2013 Chiquito Crasto et al.This is an open access article distributed under theCreative CommonsAttribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Quantitative proteomics applications in mass spectrometry depend on the knowledge of the mass-to-charge ratio (m/z) values of proteotypic peptides for the proteins under study and their product ions. MRMPath and MRMutation, web-based bioinformatics software that are platform independent, facilitate the recovery of this information by biologists. MRMPath utilizes publicly available information related to biological pathways in the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database. All the proteins involved in pathways of interest are recovered and processed in silico to extract information relevant to quantitative mass spectrometry analysis. Peptides may also be subjected to automated BLAST analysis to determine whether they are proteotypic. MRMutation catalogs andmakes available, following processing, known (mutant) variants of proteins from the current UniProtKB database. All these results, available via the web from well-maintained, public databases, are written to an Excel spreadsheet, which the user can download and save. MRMPath and MRMutation can be freely accessed. As a system that seeks to allow two or mor