Spectral Library Generating Function for Assessing Spectrum-Spectrum Match Significance

Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) continues to be the technology of choice for high-throughput analysis of complex proteomics samples. While MS/MS spectra are commonly identified by matching against a database of known protein sequences, the complementary approach of spectral library searching [1,2,3] against collections of reference spectra consistently outperforms sequence-based searches by resulting in significantly more identified spectra. But despite this demonstrated superior sensitivity, the development of methods to determine the statistical significance of Spectrum-Spectrum Matches (SSMs) in peptide spectral library searches is still in its early stages.