IsAProteinDB: An Indexed Database of Trypsinized Proteins for Fast Peptide Mass Fingerprinting

In peptite mass fingerprinting, an unknown protein is fragmented into smaller peptides whose masses are accurately measured; the obtained list of weights is then compared with a reference database to obtain a set of matching proteins. The exponential growth of known proteins discourage the use of brute force methods, where the weights' list is compared with each protein in the reference collection; luckily, the scientific literature in the database field highlights that well designed searching algorithms, coupled with a proper data organization, allow to quickly solve the identification problem even on standard desktop computers. In this paper, IsAProteinsDB, an indexed database of trypsinized proteins, is presented. The corresponding search algorithm shows a time complexity that does not significantly depends on the size of the reference protein database.