peptide sequence

The “Sequence Tag” protein identification technique was developed by Matthias Mann and Matthias Wilm in the mid 90s, while at the Protein and Peptide Group at the EMBL in Heidelberg Germany. In the spirit of open research and the early internet Dr. Mann made the search program “Peptide Search”, freely available along with regularly updated databases distributed through EBI. This program is no longer available (2010) as a standalone Macintosh application from Matthias Wilm at the EMBL. This search technique was and is far advanced for it’s time and leverages the idea of search constraint to its maximum potential. Sequence Tag employs MS/MS data produced by tandem MS methods. In this search strategy the peptide fragment spectrum is searched for obvious sequence tags. A sequence tag is a short string of amino acid mass differences deduced from the fragment spectrum.