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Comment
. 2009 Sep;8(9):4328-32.
doi: 10.1021/pr900349r.

Reanalysis of Tyrannosaurus rex Mass Spectra

Marshall Bern  1 , Brett S Phinney, David Goldberg
Affiliations
Comment

Reanalysis of Tyrannosaurus rex Mass Spectra

Marshall Bern et al. J Proteome Res. 2009 Sep.

Abstract

Asara et al. reported the detection of collagen peptides in a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone by shotgun proteomics. This finding has been called into question as a possible statistical artifact. We reanalyze Asara et al.'s tandem mass spectra using a different search engine and different statistical tools. Our reanalysis shows a sample containing common laboratory contaminants, soil bacteria, and bird-like hemoglobin and collagen.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
This plot gives a histogram showing the number of decoy matches for the wide and narrow searches as a function of ByOnic score. The top hits to distinct collagen peptides have scores 509, 526, and 536, better than any decoy matches, with empirical E-values below 1. The top hit to bird hemoglobin beta has score 782, with an extrapolated E-value below 0.001.
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Comment on

References

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    1. Bern M, Cai Y, Goldberg D. Lookup peaks: a hybrid of de novo sequencing and database search for protein identification by tandem mass spectrometry. Anal Chem. 2007;79:1393–1400. - PubMed

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