The article entitled “PRG Concludes Ion Traps, Software Less Reliable for De Novo Peptide Sequencing” in the Feb. 11 issue of ProteoMonitor should have mentioned the purpose of the Proteomics Research Group study. The article neglected to mention that the results reported in the article did not represent the core aim of the study.
According to a letter e-mailed to ProteoMonitor on Feb. 24 by the Association of Biomolecular Research Facilities, “[t]he purpose of [the] study was to evaluate the capabilities of core laboratories to determine the sequences of peptides not found in any published database. The main findings of our study relate to the difficulty of de novo peptide sequencing, the importance of high mass accuracy for obtaining good results, the benefit of using multiple approaches, and the shortcomings of current software.
“The study was not designed to compare different types of instruments, as the headline of your article suggests. While our results showed some differences in the de novo sequencing results for different instrument types, we clearly noted that the number of each type of instrument was too small to draw conclusions, and that we did not control for operator expertise.”