de novo sequencing

The sequence of peptide/protein is important to study the biological function of the peptide/protein. However, complete characterization of peptides/proteins, including post-translational modifications (PTMs), sequence mutations and variants, is very challenging. There are two approaches to determine the sequence of peptide/protein by mass spectrometry: database search and de novo sequencing. Database search approach compares acquired mass spectra to a database of known protein sequences to identify the protein sequences. De novo sequencing is a process in which amino acid sequences are directly interpreted from tandem mass spectra without the assistance of a database.