Hi Panos, >From your questions it seems like you would get a lot of benefit from the TPP 5-day course. I suggest keeping an eye on this group for announcements of when one might be available that you can attend.
Here are some brief answers in the meantime. Each search engine is attempting to assign as many spectra to peptides as possible, however each takes its own approach to solving this problem. Therefore some engines perform better in certain circumstances, while others might prevail in alternate circumstances. The speed of the search engine is not correlated with the quality of its output. There are a number of good papers on mass spec search engines that you can easily explore via pubmed or google scholar. Generally analysts will just use a single search engine because it's the common one used in their lab. An example of this would be the Andromeda search engine built into the popular MaxQuant software, or Mascot which has a long history in the field. The TPP is agnostic and allows the analyst to use the search engine of their choice, although it comes with some bundled in for convenience. I would suggest trying a few on your data to get an empirical idea of which perform the best for your platform. Combining results from multiple search engines does generally boost total peptide-spectrum matches, but I wouldn't say it's a common practice. The trade off in computational time may not be worth the gains. Again, I strongly suggest you attend the TPP course or chat with some of the team at a conference booth, because I am leaving out a lot of nuance here. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "spctools-discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/spctools-discuss. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
