Wednesday, January 11, 2017

UniPept -- a CompOmics resource for metaproteomics!


CompOmics is churning out awesome tools for our community faster than I can keep track of them. Somehow, unsurprisingly, I completely missed that they've got a full metaproteomics pipeline up.

You can check out UniPept here!

I don't want to waste my time and yours going over the features listed on the front page -- but the "Unique Peptide Finder" and "Peptidome clustering" are tools I've never seen before in a web interface.

Wait---I just wasted all my coffee time playing with the clustering tool -- this is unbelievable. How did I not know about this?!?  Check this out!


You can load the proteomes of over 15,000 species for easy unique peptide identification (for species differentiation) and for clustering the peptidomes.  I don't know what they have this housed on, but these analyses occur almost as rapidly as I can add a new proteome/peptidome to the analysis.

In this analysis I went with a simple model organism, Bacillus subtilis and some close relatives. You can interact fully with the graph and immediately download the table or the figure as is. The green line is my favorite part -- and the most mysterious (where is this paper?!?) it gives you a measurement of the "unique peptidome" of each organism. So...how many peptides that, by our current knowledge of the genome/proteome where if you find that peptide -- this organism is present!?!?

This tool is brilliant -- absurdly powerful -- and bears further investigation!  Shoutout to the EuBic Winter school for all the Tweets, one of which led me here -- and to @PastelBio for keeping a huge curated list of proteomics databases so I could easily hunt this down!

1 comment:

  1. Really appreciate the plug for @PastelBio and the database resource... always wonder whether it's worth putting the effort in to keep it going but always happy when I do notice that people use it.

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