MGVB: a new proteomics toolset for fast and efficient data analysis

MGVB is a collection of tools for proteomics data analysis. It covers data processing from in silico digestion of protein sequences to comprehensive identification of postranslational modifications and solving the protein inference problem. The toolset is developed with efficiency in mind. It enables analysis at a fraction of the resources cost typically required by existing commercial and free tools. MGVB, as it is a native application, is much faster than existing proteomics tools such as MaxQuant and MSFragger and, in the same time, finds very similar, in some cases even larger number of peptides at a chosen level of statistical significance. It implements a probabilistic scoring function to match spectra to sequences, and a novel combinatorial search strategy for finding post-translational modifications, and a Bayesian approach to locate modification sites. This report describes the algorithms behind the tools, presents benchmarking data sets analysis comparing MGVB performance to MaxQuant/Andromeda, and provides step by step instructions for using it in typical analytical scenarios. The toolset is provided free to download and use for academic research and in software projects, but is not open source at the present. It is the intention of the author that it will be made open source in the near future—following rigorous evaluations and feedback from the proteomics research community.