An algorithm for decoy-free false discovery rate estimation in XL-MS/MS proteomics.

motivationCross-linking tandem mass spectrometry (XL-MS/MS) is an established analytical platform used to determine distance constraints between residues within a protein or from physically interacting proteins, thus improving our understanding of protein structure and function. To aid biological discovery with XL-MS/MS, it is essential that pairs of chemically linked peptides be accurately identified, a process that requires: (i) database search, that creates a ranked list of candidate peptide pairs for each experimental spectrum and (ii) false discovery rate (FDR) estimation, that determines the probability of a false match in a group of top-ranked peptide pairs with scores above a given threshold. Currently, the only available FDR estimation mechanism in XL-MS/MS is the target-decoy approach (TDA). However, despite its simplicity, TDA has both theoretical and practical limitations that impact the estimation accuracy and increase run time over potential decoy-free approaches (DFAs).

resultsWe introduce a novel decoy-free framework for FDR estimation in XL-MS/MS. Our approach relies on multi-sample mixtures of skew normal distributions, where the latent components correspond to the scores of correct peptide pairs (both peptides identified correctly), partially incorrect peptide pairs (one peptide identified correctly, the other incorrectly), and incorrect peptide pairs (both peptides identified incorrectly). To learn these components, we exploit the score distributions of first- and second-ranked peptide-spectrum matches for each experimental spectrum and subsequently estimate FDR using a novel expectation-maximization algorithm with constraints. We evaluate the method on ten datasets and provide evidence that the proposed DFA is theoretically sound and a viable alternative to TDA owing to its good performance in terms of accuracy, variance of estimation, and run time. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://github.com/shawn-peng/xlms.