Bioinformatic methods to exploit mass spectrometric data for proteomic applications

The new technologies in mass spectrometric analysis of peptides and proteins necessary to accommodate proteomics-scale analyses require, in turn, concomitant development of informatics technologies suitable for very large-scale data handling and analysis. This chapter focuses on the data analysis tools available to the community for analysis of mass spectrometric proteomics data. Different database searching strategies are discussed for peptide and protein identification, and approaches and tools available for comparative quantitative analysis of samples are outlined.