A Proteomic Approach for Identification of Bacteria Using Tandem Mass Spectrometry Combined With a Translatome Database and Statistical Scoring

: We describe a novel method for fast identification of bacteria based on amino acid sequencing of a random set of peptides derived from bacterial cellular proteins through searches of their production mass spectra against a database translated from fully sequenced bacterial genomes. An in-house developed algorithm for filtering of search results have been tested with Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli microorganisms. This approach allowed for the selection of peptide assignments to microbial genomes with desired specificities, sensitivities and error rates, allowing for unambiguous identification of the test bacteria among 87 database microorganisms.