BiocStyle::markdown()
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("DT"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("BiocManager"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("mzR"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("MSnbase"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("mzID"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("rpx"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("MALDIquant"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("MALDIquantForeign"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("rols"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("hpar"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("BRAIN"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("org.Hs.eg.db"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("GO.db"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("Rdisop"))
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("biomaRt"))

Introduction {#sec:intro}

This document illustrates some existing R infrastructure for the analysis of proteomics data. It presents the code for the use cases taken from [@R4Prot2013,Gatto:2015]. A pre-print of [@R4Prot2013] available on arXiv and [@Gatto:2015] is open access.

There are however numerous additional R resources distributed by the Bioconductor and CRAN repositories, as well as packages hosted on personal websites. Section \@ref(sec:packages) tries to provide a wider picture of available packages, without going into details.

NB: I you are interested in R packages for mass spectrometry-based proteomics and metabolomics, see also the R for Mass Spectrometry initiative packages and the tutorial book. It provides more up-to-date packages and solutions for several of the tasks described below.

General R resources {#sec:rres}

The reader is expected to have basic R knowledge to find the document helpful. There are numerous R introductions freely available, some of which are listed below.

From the R project web-page:

Relevant background on the R software and its application to computational biology in general and proteomics in particular can also be found in [@R4Prot2013]. For details about the Bioconductor project, the reader is referred to [@Gentleman2004].

Bioconductor resources {#sec:biocres}

The Bioconductor offers many educational resources on its help page, in addition the package's vignettes (vignettes are a requirement for Bioconductor packages). We want to draw the attention to the Bioconductor work flows that offer a cross-package overview about a specific topic. In particular, there is now a Mass spectrometry and proteomics data analysis work flow.

Getting help

All R packages come with ample documentation. Every command (function, class or method) a user is susceptible to use is documented. The documentation can be accessed by preceding the command by a ? in the R console. For example, to obtain help about the library function, that will be used in the next section, one would type ?library. In addition, all Bioconductor packages come with at least one vignette (this document is the vignette that comes with the r Biocpkg("RforProteomics") package), a document that combines text and R code that is executed before the pdf is assembled. To look up all vignettes that come with a package, say r Biocpkg("RforProteomics") and then open the vignette of interest, one uses the vignette function as illustrated below. More details can be found in ?vignette.

## list all the vignettes in the RforProteomics package
vignette(package = "RforProteomics")
## Open the vignette called RforProteomics
vignette("RforProteomics", package = "RforProteomics")
## or just
vignette("RforProteomics")

R has several mailing lists. The most relevant here being the main R-help list, for discussion about problem and solutions using R, ideal for general R content and is not suitable for bioinformatics or proteomics questions. Bioconductor also offers several resources dedicated to bioinformatics matters and Bioconductor packages, in particular the main Bioconductor support forum for Bioconductor-related queries.

It is advised to read and comply to the posting guides (and here to maximise the chances to obtain good responses. It is important to specify the software versions using the sessionInfo() functions (see an example output at the end of this document. It the question involves some code, make sure to isolate the relevant portion and report it with your question, trying to make your code/example reproducible.

Installation

The package should be installed using as described below:

## only first time you install Bioconductor packages
if (!requireNamespace("BiocManager", quietly=TRUE))
    install.packages("BiocManager")
## else
library("BiocManager")
BiocManager::install("RforProteomics")

To install all dependencies and reproduce the code in the vignette, replace the last line in the code chunk above with:)

BiocManager::install("RforProteomics", dependencies = TRUE)

Finally, the package can be loaded with

library("RforProteomics")

See also the r Biocpkg("RforProteomics") web page for more information on installation.

External dependencies

Some packages used in the document depend on external libraries that need to be installed prior to the R packages:

Obtaining the code

The code in this document describes all the examples presented in [@R4Prot2013] and can be copy, pasted and executed. It is however more convenient to have it in a separate text file for better interaction with R to easily modify and explore it. This can be achieved with the Stangle function. One needs the Sweave source of this document (a document combining the narration and the R code) and the Stangle then specifically extracts the code chunks and produces a clean R source file. If the package is installed, the following code chunk will direct you to the RforProteomics.R file containing all the annotated source code contained in this document.

## gets the vignette source
rfile <- system.file("doc/RforProteomics.R",
                     package = "RforProteomics")
rfile

Prepare the working environment

The packages that we will depend on to execute the examples will be loaded in the respective sections. Here, we pre-load packages that provide general functionality used throughout the document.

library("RColorBrewer") ## Color palettes
library("ggplot2")  ## Convenient and nice plotting
library("reshape2") ## Flexibly reshape data

Data standards and input/output

The mzR package {#sec:mzr}

Raw MS data

The r Biocpkg("mzR") package [@Chambers2012] provides a unified interface to various mass spectrometry open formats. This code chunk, taken from the openMSfile documentation, illustrated how to open a connection to an raw data file. The example mzML data is taken from the r Biocexptpkg("msdata") data package. The code below would also be applicable to an mzXML, mzData or netCDF file.

## load the required packages
library("mzR") ## the software package
library("msdata") ## the data package
## below, we extract the releavant example file
## from the local 'msdata' installation
filepath <- system.file("microtofq", package = "msdata")
file <- list.files(filepath, pattern="MM14.mzML",
                   full.names=TRUE, recursive = TRUE)
## creates a commection to the mzML file
mz <- openMSfile(file)
## demonstraction of data access
basename(fileName(mz))
runInfo(mz)
instrumentInfo(mz)
## once finished, it is good to explicitely
## close the connection
close(mz)

r Biocpkg("mzR") is used by other packages, like r Biocpkg("MSnbase") [@Gatto2012], r Biocpkg("TargetSearch") [@TargetSearch2009] and r Biocpkg("xcms") [@Smith2006, Benton2008, Tautenhahn2008], that provide a higher level abstraction to the data.

Identification data

The r Biocpkg("mzR") package also provides very fast access to mzIdentML data by leveraging proteowizard's C++ parser.

file <- system.file("mzid", "Tandem.mzid.gz", package="msdata")
mzid <- openIDfile(file)
mzid

Once and mzRident identification file handle has been established, various data and metadata can be extracted, as illustrated below.

softwareInfo(mzid)
enzymes(mzid)
names(psms(mzid))
head(psms(mzid))[, 1:13]

Handling MS2 identification data with r Biocpkg("mzID") {#subsec:mzID}

The r Biocpkg("mzID") package allows to load and manipulate MS2 data in the mzIdentML format. The main mzID function reads such a file and constructs an instance of class mzID.

library("mzID")
mzids <- list.files(system.file('extdata', package = 'mzID'),
                    pattern = '*.mzid', full.names = TRUE)
mzids
id <- mzID(mzids[1])
id

Multiple files can be parsed in one go, possibly in parallel if the environment supports it. When this is done an mzIDCollection object is returned:

ids <- mzID(mzids[1:2])
ids

Peptides, scans, parameters, ... can be extracted with the respective peptides, scans, parameters, ... functions. The mzID object can also be converted into a data.frame using the flatten function.

fid <- flatten(id)
names(fid)
dim(fid)

Raw data abstraction with MSnExp objects

r Biocpkg("MSnbase") [@Gatto2012] provides base functions and classes for MS-based proteomics that allow facile data and meta-data processing, manipulation and plotting (see for instance figure below).

library("MSnbase")
## uses a simple dummy test included in the package
mzXML <- dir(system.file(package="MSnbase",dir="extdata"),
             full.name=TRUE,
             pattern="mzXML$")
basename(mzXML)
## reads the raw data into and MSnExp instance
raw <- readMSData(mzXML, verbose = FALSE, centroided = TRUE)
raw
## Extract a single spectrum
raw[[3]]
plot(raw, full = TRUE)
plot(raw[[3]], full = TRUE, reporters = iTRAQ4)

mgf read/write support

Read and write support for data in the mgf and mzTab formats are available via the readMgfData/writeMgfData and readMzTabData/writeMzTabData functions, respectively. An example for the latter is shown in the next section.

Quantitative proteomics

As an running example throughout this document, we will use a TMT 6-plex data set, PXD000001 to illustrate quantitative data processing. The code chunk below first downloads this data file from the ProteomeXchange server using the r Biocpkg("rpx") package.

The mzTab format

The first code chunk downloads the mzTab data from the ProteomeXchange repository [@Vizcaino2014].

## Experiment information
library("rpx")
px1 <- PXDataset("PXD000001")
px1
pxfiles(px1)
## Downloading the mzTab data
mztab <- pxget(px1, "F063721.dat-mztab.txt")
mztab

The code below loads the mzTab file into R and generates an MSnSet instance^[Here, we specify mzTab format version 0.9. Recent files have been generated according to the latest specifications, version 1.0, and the version does not need to be specified explicitly.], removes missing values and calculates protein intensities by summing the peptide quantitation data. The figure below illustrates the intensities for 5 proteins.

## Load mzTab peptide data
qnt <- readMzTabData(mztab, what = "PEP", version = "0.9")
sampleNames(qnt) <- reporterNames(TMT6)
head(exprs(qnt))
## remove missing values
qnt <- filterNA(qnt)
processingData(qnt)

## combine into proteins
## - using the 'accession' feature meta data
## - sum the peptide intensities
protqnt <- combineFeatures(qnt,
                           groupBy = fData(qnt)$accession,
                           method = sum)
cls <- brewer.pal(5, "Set1")
matplot(t(tail(exprs(protqnt), n = 5)), type = "b",
        lty = 1, col = cls,
        ylab = "Protein intensity (summed peptides)",
        xlab = "TMT reporters")
legend("topright", tail(featureNames(protqnt), n=5),
       lty = 1, bty = "n", cex = .8, col = cls)
qntS <- normalise(qnt, "sum")
qntV <- normalise(qntS, "vsn")
qntV2 <- normalise(qnt, "vsn")

acc <- c("P00489", "P00924",
         "P02769", "P62894",
         "ECA")

idx <- sapply(acc, grep, fData(qnt)$accession)
idx2 <- sapply(idx, head, 3)
small <- qntS[unlist(idx2), ]

idx3 <- sapply(idx, head, 10)
medium <- qntV[unlist(idx3), ]

m <- exprs(medium)
colnames(m) <- c("126", "127", "128",
                 "129", "130", "131")
rownames(m) <- fData(medium)$accession
rownames(m)[grep("CYC", rownames(m))] <- "CYT"
rownames(m)[grep("ENO", rownames(m))] <- "ENO"
rownames(m)[grep("ALB", rownames(m))] <- "BSA"
rownames(m)[grep("PYGM", rownames(m))] <- "PHO"
rownames(m)[grep("ECA", rownames(m))] <- "Background"

cls <- c(brewer.pal(length(unique(rownames(m)))-1, "Set1"),
         "grey")
names(cls) <- unique(rownames(m))
wbcol <- colorRampPalette(c("white", "darkblue"))(256)
heatmap(m, col = wbcol, RowSideColors=cls[rownames(m)])
dfr <- data.frame(exprs(small),
                  Protein = as.character(fData(small)$accession),
                  Feature = featureNames(small),
                  stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
colnames(dfr) <- c("126", "127", "128", "129", "130", "131",
                   "Protein", "Feature")
dfr$Protein[dfr$Protein == "sp|P00924|ENO1_YEAST"] <- "ENO"
dfr$Protein[dfr$Protein == "sp|P62894|CYC_BOVIN"]  <- "CYT"
dfr$Protein[dfr$Protein == "sp|P02769|ALBU_BOVIN"] <- "BSA"
dfr$Protein[dfr$Protein == "sp|P00489|PYGM_RABIT"] <- "PHO"
dfr$Protein[grep("ECA", dfr$Protein)] <- "Background"
dfr2 <- melt(dfr)
ggplot(aes(x = variable, y = value, colour = Protein),
       data = dfr2) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_line(aes(group=as.factor(Feature)), alpha = 0.5) +
  facet_grid(. ~ Protein) + theme(legend.position="none") +
  labs(x = "Reporters", y = "Normalised intensity")

Third-party data

It is possible to import any arbitrary text-based spreadsheet as MSnSet object using either readMSnSet or readMSnSet2. The former takes three spreadsheets as input (for the expression data and the feature and sample meta-data). The latter uses a single spreadsheet and a vector of expression columns to populate the assay data and the feature meta-data. Detailed examples are provided in the MSnbase-io vignette, that can be consulted from R with vignette("MSnbase-io") or online.

Working with raw data

We reuse our dedicated px1 ProteomeXchange data object to download the raw data (in mzXML format) and load it with the readMSData from the r Biocpkg("MSnbase") package that produces a raw data experiment object of class MSnExp (a new on-disk infrastructure is now available to access the raw data on disk on demand, rather than loading it all in memory, enabling the management of more and larger files - see the benchmarking vignette in the r Biocpkg("MSnbase") package for details). The raw data is then quantified using the quantify method specifying the TMT 6-plex isobaric tags and a 7th peak of interest corresponding to the un-dissociated reporter tag peaks (see the MSnbase-demo vignette in r Biocpkg("MSnbase") for details).

mzxml <- pxget(px1, "TMT_Erwinia_1uLSike_Top10HCD_isol2_45stepped_60min_01.mzXML")
rawms <- readMSData(mzxml, centroided = TRUE, verbose = FALSE)
qntms <- quantify(rawms, reporters = TMT7, method = "max")
qntms

Identification data in the mzIdentML format can be added to MSnExp or MSnSet instances with the addIdentificationData function. See the function documentation for examples.

d <- data.frame(Signal = rowSums(exprs(qntms)[, 1:6]),
                Incomplete = exprs(qntms)[, 7])
d <- log(d)
cls <- rep("#00000050", nrow(qnt))
pch <- rep(1, nrow(qnt))
cls[grep("P02769", fData(qnt)$accession)] <- "gold4" ## BSA
cls[grep("P00924", fData(qnt)$accession)] <- "dodgerblue" ## ENO
cls[grep("P62894", fData(qnt)$accession)] <- "springgreen4" ## CYT
cls[grep("P00489", fData(qnt)$accession)] <- "darkorchid2" ## PHO
pch[grep("P02769", fData(qnt)$accession)] <- 19
pch[grep("P00924", fData(qnt)$accession)] <- 19
pch[grep("P62894", fData(qnt)$accession)] <- 19
pch[grep("P00489", fData(qnt)$accession)] <- 19
mzp <- plotMzDelta(rawms, reporters = TMT6, verbose = FALSE) + ggtitle("")
mzp
plot(Signal ~ Incomplete, data = d,
     xlab = expression(Incomplete~dissociation),
     ylab = expression(Sum~of~reporters~intensities),
     pch = 19,
     col = "#4582B380")
grid()
abline(0, 1, lty = "dotted")
abline(lm(Signal ~ Incomplete, data = d), col = "darkblue")
MAplot(qnt[, c(4, 2)], cex = .9, col = cls, pch = pch, show.statistics = FALSE)

The r CRANpkg("MALDIquant") package

This section illustrates some of r CRANpkg("MALDIquant")'s data processing capabilities [@Gibb2012]. The code is taken from the processing-peaks.R script downloaded from the package homepage.

Loading the data {-}

## load packages
library("MALDIquant")
library("MALDIquantForeign")
## getting test data
datapath <-
  file.path(system.file("Examples",
                        package = "readBrukerFlexData"),
            "2010_05_19_Gibb_C8_A1")
dir(datapath)
sA1 <- importBrukerFlex(datapath, verbose=FALSE)
# in the following we use only the first spectrum
s <- sA1[[1]]

summary(mass(s))
summary(intensity(s))
head(as.matrix(s))
plot(s)

{Preprocessing} {-}

## sqrt transform (for variance stabilization)
s2 <- transformIntensity(s, method="sqrt")
s2

## smoothing - 5 point moving average
s3 <- smoothIntensity(s2, method="MovingAverage", halfWindowSize=2)
s3

## baseline subtraction
s4 <- removeBaseline(s3, method="SNIP")
s4

Peak picking {-}

## peak picking
p <- detectPeaks(s4)
length(p) # 181
peak.data <- as.matrix(p) # extract peak information
par(mfrow=c(2,3))
xl <- range(mass(s))
# use same xlim on all plots for better comparison
plot(s, sub="", main="1: raw", xlim=xl)
plot(s2, sub="", main="2: variance stabilisation", xlim=xl)
plot(s3, sub="", main="3: smoothing", xlim=xl)
plot(s4, sub="", main="4: base line correction", xlim=xl)
plot(s4, sub="", main="5: peak detection", xlim=xl)
points(p)
top20 <- intensity(p) %in% sort(intensity(p), decreasing=TRUE)[1:20]
labelPeaks(p, index=top20, underline=TRUE)
plot(p, sub="", main="6: peak plot", xlim=xl)
labelPeaks(p, index=top20, underline=TRUE)

Working with peptide sequences

library(BRAIN)
atoms <- getAtomsFromSeq("SIVPSGASTGVHEALEMR")
unlist(atoms)

library(Rdisop)
pepmol <- getMolecule(paste0(names(atoms),
                             unlist(atoms),
                             collapse = ""))
pepmol

##
library(OrgMassSpecR)
data(itraqdata)

simplottest <-
  itraqdata[featureNames(itraqdata) %in% paste0("X", 46:47)]
sim <- SpectrumSimilarity(as(simplottest[[1]], "data.frame"),
                          as(simplottest[[2]], "data.frame"),
                          top.lab = "itraqdata[['X46']]",
                          bottom.lab = "itraqdata[['X47']]",
                          b = 25)
title(main = paste("Spectrum similarity", round(sim, 3)))

MonoisotopicMass(formula = list(C = 2, O = 1, H=6))
molecule <- getMolecule("C2H5OH")
molecule$exactmass
## x11()
## plot(t(.pepmol$isotopes[[1]]), type = "h")

## x <- IsotopicDistribution(formula = list(C = 2, O = 1, H=6))
## t(molecule$isotopes[[1]])
## par(mfrow = c(2,1))
## plot(t(molecule$isotopes[[1]]), type = "h")
## plot(x[, c(1,3)], type = "h")

## data(myo500)
## masses <- c(147.053, 148.056)
## intensities <- c(93, 5.8)
## molecules <- decomposeIsotopes(masses, intensities)

## experimental eno peptides
exppep <-
  as.character(fData(qnt[grep("ENO", fData(qnt)[, 2]), ])[, 1]) ## 13
minlength <- min(nchar(exppep))


if (!file.exists("P00924.fasta"))
    eno <- download.file("http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P00924.fasta",
                         destfile = "P00924.fasta")
eno <- paste(readLines("P00924.fasta")[-1], collapse = "")
enopep <- Digest(eno, missed = 1)
nrow(enopep) ## 103
sum(nchar(enopep$peptide) >= minlength) ## 68
pepcnt <- enopep[enopep[, 1] %in% exppep, ]
nrow(pepcnt) ## 13

The following code chunks demonstrate how to use the r Biocpkg("cleaver") package for in-silico cleavage of polypeptides, e.g. cleaving of Gastric juice peptide 1 (P01358) using Trypsin:

library(cleaver)
cleave("LAAGKVEDSD", enzym = "trypsin")

Sometimes cleavage is not perfect and the enzym miss some cleavage positions:

## miss one cleavage position
cleave("LAAGKVEDSD", enzym = "trypsin", missedCleavages = 1)

## miss zero or one cleavage positions
cleave("LAAGKVEDSD", enzym = "trypsin", missedCleavages = 0:1)

Example code to generate an Texshade image to be included directly in a Latex document or R vignette is presented below. The R code generates a Texshade environment and the annotated sequence display code that is written to a TeX file that can itself be included into a LaTeX or Sweave document.

seq1file <- "seq1.tex"
cat("\\begin{texshade}{Figures/P00924.fasta}
     \\setsize{numbering}{footnotesize}
     \\setsize{residues}{footnotesize}
     \\residuesperline*{70}
     \\shadingmode{functional}
     \\hideconsensus
     \\vsepspace{1mm}
     \\hidenames
     \\noblockskip\n", file = seq1file)
tmp <- sapply(1:nrow(pepcnt), function(i) {
  col <- ifelse((i %% 2) == 0, "Blue", "RoyalBlue")
  cat("\\shaderegion{1}{", pepcnt$start[i], "..", pepcnt$stop[i], "}{White}{", col, "}\n",
      file = seq1file, append = TRUE)
})
cat("\\end{texshade}
    \\caption{Visualising observed peptides for the Yeast enolase protein. Peptides are shaded in blue and black.
              The last peptide is a mis-cleavage and overlaps with \`IEEELGDNAVFAGENFHHGDK`.}
    \ {#fig:seq}
  \\end{center}
\\end{figure}\n\n",
    file = seq1file, append = TRUE)

N15 incorporation {-}

## 15N incorporation rates from 0, 0.1, ..., 0.9, 0.95, 1
incrate <- c(seq(0, 0.9, 0.1), 0.95, 1)
inc <- lapply(incrate, function(inc)
              IsotopicDistributionN("YEVQGEVFTKPQLWP", inc))
par(mfrow = c(4,3))
for (i in 1:length(inc))
  plot(inc[[i]][, c(1, 3)], xlim = c(1823, 1848), type = "h",
       main = paste0("15N incorporation at ", incrate[i]*100, "%"))

The r Biocpkg("isobar") package

The r Biocpkg("isobar") package [@Breitwieser2011] provides methods for the statistical analysis of isobarically tagged MS2 experiments. Please refer to the package vignette for more details.

The r Biocpkg("DEP") package

The r Biocpkg("DEP") package supports analysis of label-free and TMT pipelines using, as described in its vignette. These can be used with MSnSet objects by converting them to/from SummarizedExperiment objects:

data(msnset)
se <- as(msnset, "SummarizedExperiment")
se
ms <- as(se, "MSnSet")
ms

The r Biocpkg("synapter") package

The r Biocpkg("synapter") [@synapter] package comes with a detailed vignette that describes how to prepare the MSE data and then process it in R. Several interfaces are available provided the user with maximum control, easy batch processing capabilities or a graphical user interface. The conversion into MSnSet instances and filter and combination thereof as well as statistical analysis are also described.

## open the synapter vignette
library("synapter")
synapterGuide()

MS2 spectra identification

Post-search Filtering of MS/MS IDs Using r Biocpkg("MSnID")

The main purpose of r Biocpkg("MSnID") package is to make sure that the peptide and protein identifications resulting from MS/MS searches are sufficiently confident for a given application.} MS/MS peptide and protein identification is a process that prone to uncertanities. A typical and currently most reliable way to quantify uncertainty in the list of identify spectra, peptides or proteins relies on so-called decoy database. For bottom-up (i.e. involving protein digestion) approaches a common way to construct a decoy database is simple inversion of protein amino-acid sequences. If the spectrum matches to normal protein sequence it can be true or false match. Matches to decoy part of the database are false only (excluding the palindromes). Therefore the false discovery rate (FDR) of identifications can be estimated as ratio of hits to decoy over normal parts of the protein sequence database. There are multiple levels of identification that FDR can be estimated for. First, is at the level of peptide/protein- to-spectrum matches. Second is at the level of unique peptide sequences. Note, true peptides tend to be identified by more then one spectrum. False peptide tend to be sporadic. Therefore, after collapsing the redundant peptide identifications from multiple spectra to the level of unique peptide sequence, the FDR typically increases. The extend of FDR increase depends on the type and complexity of the sample. The same trend is true for estimating the identification FDR at the protein level. True proteins tend to be identified with multiple peptides, while false protein identifications are commonly covered only by one peptide. Therefore FDR estimate tend to be even higher for protein level compare to peptide level. The estimation of the FDR is also affected by the number of LC-MS (runs) datasets in the experiment. Again, true identifications tend to be more consistent from run to run, while false are sporadic. After collapsing the redundancy across the runs, the number of true identification reduces much stronger compare to false identifications. Therefore, the peptide and protein FDR estimates need to be re-evaluated. The main objective of the MSnID package is to provide convenience tools for handling tasks on estimation of FDR, defining and optimizing the filtering criteria and ensuring confidence in MS/MS identification data. The user can specify the criteria for filtering the data (e.g. goodness or p-value of matching of experimental and theoretical fragmentation mass spectrum, deviation of theoretical from experimentally measured mass, presence of missed cleavages in the peptide sequence, etc), evaluate the performance of the filter judging by FDRs at spectrum, peptide and protein levels, and finally optimize the filter to achieve the maximum number of identifications while not exceeding maximally allowed FDR upper threshold.

Starting Project and Importing Data {-}

To start a project one have to specify a directory. Currently the only use of the directory is for storing cached results.

library("MSnID")
msnid <- MSnID(".")

Data can imported as data.frame or read from mzIdentML file.

PSMresults <- read.delim(system.file("extdata", "human_brain.txt",
                                     package="MSnID"),
                         stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
psms(msnid) <- PSMresults
show(msnid)
mzids <- system.file("extdata", "c_elegans.mzid.gz", package="MSnID")
msnid <- read_mzIDs(msnid, mzids)
show(msnid)

Analysis of Peptide Sequences {-}

A particular properties of peptide sequences we are interested in are

  1. irregular cleavages at the termini of the peptides and
  2. missing cleavage site within the peptide sequences.

A particular properties of peptide sequences we are interested in are (1) irregular cleavages at the termini of the peptides and (2) missing cleavage site within the peptide sequences:

The default regular expressions for the validCleavagePattern and missedCleavagePattern correspond to trypsin specificity.

msnid <- assess_termini(msnid, validCleavagePattern="[KR]\\.[^P]")
msnid <- assess_missed_cleavages(msnid, missedCleavagePattern="[KR](?=[^P$])")
prop.table(table(msnid$numIrregCleavages))

Now the object has two more columns, numIrregCleavages and numMissCleavages, evidently corresponding to the number of termini with irregular cleavages and number of missed cleavages within the peptide sequence. The figure below shows that peptides with 2 or more missed cleavages are likely to be false identifications.

pepCleav <- unique(psms(msnid)[,c("numMissCleavages", "isDecoy", "peptide")])
pepCleav <- as.data.frame(table(pepCleav[,c("numMissCleavages", "isDecoy")]))
library("ggplot2")
ggplot(pepCleav, aes(x=numMissCleavages, y=Freq, fill=isDecoy)) +
    geom_bar(stat='identity', position='dodge') +
    ggtitle("Number of Missed Cleavages")

Defining the Filter {-}

The criteria that will be used for filtering the MS/MS data has to be present in the MSnID object. We will use -log10 transformed MS-GF+ Spectrum E-value, reflecting the goodness of match experimental and theoretical fragmentation patterns as one the filtering criteria. Let's store it under the "msmsScore" name. The score density distribution shows that it is a good discriminant between non-decoy (red) and decoy hits (green).

For alternative MS/MS search engines refer to the engine-specific manual for the names of parameters reflecting the quality of MS/MS spectra matching. Examples of such parameters are E-Value for X!Tandem and XCorr and $\Delta$Cn2 for SEQUEST.

As a second criterion we will be using the absolute mass measurement error (in ppm units) of the parent ion. The mass measurement errors tend to be small for non-decoy (enriched with real identificaiton) hits (red line) and is effectively uniformly distributed for decoy hits.

msnid$msmsScore <- -log10(msnid$`MS-GF:SpecEValue`)
msnid$absParentMassErrorPPM <- abs(mass_measurement_error(msnid))

MS/MS fiters are handled by a special MSnIDFilter class objects. Individual filtering criteria can be set by name (that is present in names(msnid)), comparison operator (>, <, = , ...) defining if we should retain hits with higher or lower given the threshold and finally the threshold value itself. The filter below set in such a way that retains only those matches that has less then 5 ppm of parent ion mass measurement error and more the $10^7$ MS-GF:SpecEValue.

filtObj <- MSnIDFilter(msnid)
filtObj$absParentMassErrorPPM <- list(comparison="<", threshold=5.0)
filtObj$msmsScore <- list(comparison=">", threshold=8.0)
show(filtObj)

The stringency of the filter can be evaluated at different levels.

evaluate_filter(msnid, filtObj, level="PSM")
evaluate_filter(msnid, filtObj, level="peptide")
evaluate_filter(msnid, filtObj, level="accession")

Optimizing the Filter {-}

The threshold values in the example above are not necessarily optimal and set just be in the range of probable values. Filters can be optimized to ensure maximum number of identifications (peptide-to-spectrum matches, unique peptide sequences or proteins) within a given FDR upper limit.

First, the filter can be optimized simply by stepping through individual parameters and their combinations. The idea has been described in [@Piehowski2013a]. The resulting MSnIDFilter object can be used for final data filtering or can be used as a good starting parameters for follow-up refining optimizations with more advanced algorithms.

filtObj.grid <- optimize_filter(filtObj, msnid, fdr.max=0.01,
                                method="Grid", level="peptide",
                                n.iter=500)
show(filtObj.grid)

The resulting filtObj.grid can be further fine tuned with such optimization routines as simulated annealing or Nelder-Mead optimization.

filtObj.nm <- optimize_filter(filtObj.grid, msnid, fdr.max=0.01,
                                method="Nelder-Mead", level="peptide",
                                n.iter=500)
show(filtObj.nm)

Evaluate non-optimized and optimized filters.

evaluate_filter(msnid, filtObj, level="peptide")
evaluate_filter(msnid, filtObj.grid, level="peptide")
evaluate_filter(msnid, filtObj.nm, level="peptide")

Finally applying filter to remove predominantly false identifications.

msnid <- apply_filter(msnid, filtObj.nm)
show(msnid)

Removing hits to decoy and contaminant sequences using the same apply_filter method.

msnid <- apply_filter(msnid, "isDecoy == FALSE")
show(msnid)
msnid <- apply_filter(msnid, "!grepl('Contaminant',accession)")
show(msnid)

Interface with Other Bioconductor Packages {-}

One can extract the entire PSMs tables as data.frame or data.table

psm.df <- psms(msnid)
psm.dt <- as(msnid, "data.table")

If only interested in the non-redundant list of confidently identified peptides or proteins

peps <- MSnID::peptides(msnid)
head(peps)
prots <- accessions(msnid)
head(prots)
prots <- proteins(msnid) # may be more intuitive then accessions
head(prots)

The r Biocpkg("MSnID") package is aimed at providing convenience functionality to handle MS/MS identifications. Quantification per se is outside of the scope of the package. The only type of quantitation that can be seamlessly tied with MS/MS identification analysis is so-called spectral counting approach. In such an approach a peptide abundance is considered to be directly proportional to the number of matched MS/MS spectra. In its turn protein abunance is proportional to the sum of the number of spectra of the matching peptides. The MSnID object can be converted to an MSnSet object defined in r Biocpkg("MSnbase") that extends generic Bioconductor eSet class to quantitative proteomics data. The spectral count data can be analyzed with r Biocpkg("msmsEDA"), r Biocpkg("msmsTests") or r Biocpkg("DESeq") packages.

msnset <- as(msnid, "MSnSet")
library("MSnbase")
head(fData(msnset))
head(exprs(msnset))

Note, the convertion from MSnID to MSnSet uses peptides as features. The number of redundant peptide observations represent so-called spectral count that can be used for rough quantitative analysis. Summing of all of the peptide counts to a proteins level can be done with combineFeatures function from r Biocpkg("MSnbase") package.

msnset <- combineFeatures(msnset,
                            fData(msnset)$accession,
                            redundancy.handler="unique",
                            fun="sum",
                            cv=FALSE)
head(fData(msnset))
head(exprs(msnset))
unlink(".Rcache", recursive=TRUE)

Quality control {#sec:qc}

Quality control (QC) is an essential part of any high throughput data driven approach. Bioconductor has a rich history of QC for various genomics data and currently two packages support proteomics QC.

r Biocpkg("proteoQC") provides a dedicated a dedicated pipeline that will produce a dynamic and extensive html report. It uses the r Biocpkg("rTANDEM") package to automate the generation of identification data and uses information about the experimental/replication design.

The r Biocpkg("qcmetrics") package is a general framework to define QC metrics and bundle them together to generate html or pdf reports. It provides some ready made metrics for MS data and N15 labelled data.

Annotation {#sec:annot}

In this section, we briefly present some Bioconductor annotation infrastructure.

We start with the r Biocpkg("hpar") package, an interface to the Human Protein Atlas [@Uhlen2005, Uhlen2010], to retrieve subcellular localisation information for the ENSG00000002746 ensemble gene.

id <- "ENSG00000105323"
library("hpar")
subcell <- hpaSubcellularLoc()
subset(subcell, Gene == id)

Below, we make use of the human annotation package r Biocannopkg("org.Hs.eg.db") and the Gene Ontology annotation package r Biocannopkg("GO.db") to retrieve compatible information with above.

library("org.Hs.eg.db")
library("GO.db")
ans <- AnnotationDbi::select(org.Hs.eg.db,
                             keys = id,
                             columns = c("ENSEMBL", "GO", "ONTOLOGY"),
                             keytype = "ENSEMBL")
ans <- ans[ans$ONTOLOGY == "CC", ]
ans
sapply(as.list(GOTERM[ans$GO]), slot, "Term")

Finally, this information can also be retrieved from on-line databases using the r Biocpkg("biomaRt") package [@Durinck2005].

library("biomaRt")
ensembl <- NULL

while (is.null(ensembl)) {
    try(ensembl <- useMart("ensembl", dataset="hsapiens_gene_ensembl"))
    Sys.sleep(2)
}
library("biomaRt")
ensembl <- useMart("ensembl", dataset="hsapiens_gene_ensembl")
efilter <- "ensembl_gene_id"
eattr <- c("go_id", "name_1006", "namespace_1003")
bmres <- getBM(attributes=eattr, filters = efilter, values = id, mart = ensembl)
bmres[bmres$namespace_1003 == "cellular_component", "name_1006"]

Other packages {#sec:packages}

Bioconductor packages

# biocVersion has to be of type character
biocv <- as.character(version())
pkTab <- list(Proteomics = proteomicsPackages(biocv),
              MassSpectrometry = massSpectrometryPackages(biocv),
              MassSpectrometryData = massSpectrometryDataPackages(biocv))

This section provides a complete list of packages available in the relevant Bioconductor version r biocv biocView categories. the tables below represent the packages for the Proteomics (r nrow(pkTab[["Proteomics"]]) packages), MassSpectrometry (r nrow(pkTab[["MassSpectrometry"]]) packages) and MassSpectrometryData (r nrow(pkTab[["MassSpectrometryData"]]) experiment packages) categories.

DT::datatable(pkTab[["Proteomics"]])
DT::datatable(pkTab[["MassSpectrometry"]])
DT::datatable(pkTab[["MassSpectrometryData"]])

The tables can easily be generated with the proteomicsPackages, massSpectrometryPackages and massSpectrometryDataPackages functions. The respective package tables can then be interactively explored using the display function.

pp <- proteomicsPackages()
display(pp)

Other CRAN packages

The CRAN task view on Chemometrics and Computational Physics is another useful ressource listing additional packages, including a set of packages for mass spectrometry and proteomics, some of which are illustrated in this document.

Suggestions for additional R packages are welcome and will be added to the vignette. Please send suggestions and possibly a short description and/or a example utilisation with code to the RforProteomics package maintainer. The only requirement is that the package must be available on an official package channel (CRAN, Bioconductor, R-forge, Omegahat), i.e. not only available through a personal web page.

Session information {#sec:sessionInfo}

All software and respective versions used in this document, as returned by sessionInfo() are detailed below.

sessionInfo()

References {-}



lgatto/RforProteomics documentation built on May 10, 2023, 11:51 p.m.