Peptigram: A Web-Based Application for Peptidomics Data Visualization

Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS)
techniques, developed for protein identification, are increasingly
being applied in the field of peptidomics. Using this approach, the
set of protein fragments observed in a sample of interest can be determined
to gain insights into important biological processes such as signaling
and other bioactivities. As the peptidomics era progresses, there
is a need for robust and convenient methods to inspect and analyze
MS/MS derived data. Here, we present Peptigram, a novel tool dedicated
to the visualization and comparison of peptides detected by MS/MS.
The principal advantage of Peptigram is that it provides visualizations
at both the protein and peptide level, allowing users to simultaneously
visualize the peptide distributions of one or more samples of interest,
mapped to their parent proteins. In this way rapid comparisons between
samples can be made in terms of their peptide coverage and abundance.
Moreover, Peptigram integrates and displays key sequence features
from external databases and links with peptide analysis tools to offer
the user a comprehensive peptide discovery resource. Here, we illustrate
the use of Peptigram on a data set of milk hydrolysates. For convenience,
Peptigram is implemented as a web application, and is freely available
for academic use at http://bioware.ucd.ie/peptigram.