Fujimoto, G. M. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2020

A generalizable method for false-discovery rate estimation in mass spectrometry-based lipidomics

Mass spectrometry (MS)-based lipidomics is revolutionizing lipid research with high throughput identification and quantification of hundreds to thousands of lipids with the goal of elucidating lipid metabolism and function. Estimates of statistical confidence in lipid identification are essential for downstream data interpretation in a biological context. In the related field of proteomics, a variety of methods for estimating false-discovery are available, and understanding the statistical confidence of identifications is typically required for data analysis and hypothesis testing. However, there is no current method for estimating the false discovery rate (FDR) or statistical confidence for MS-based lipid identifications. This has slowed the adoption of MS-based lipidomics research, as all identifications require manual inspection and validation to ensure their accuracy. We present here the first generalizable method for FDR estimation, a target/decoy approach, that allows those conducting MS-based lipidomics research to confidently adjust spectral score thresholds to minimize false discovery and to enable full automation of data analysis.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2017

Blazing Signature Filter: a library for fast pairwise similarity comparisons

Identifying similarities between datasets is a fundamental task in data mining and has become an integral part of modern scientific investigation. Whether the task is to identify co-expressed genes in large-scale expression surveys or to predict combinations of gene knockouts which would elicit a similar phenotype, the underlying computational task is often a multi-dimensional similarity test. As datasets continue to grow, improvements to the efficiency, sensitivity or specificity of such computation will have broad impacts as it allows scientists to more completely explore the wealth of scientific data. A significant practical drawback of large-scale data mining is that the vast majority of pairwise comparisons are unlikely to be relevant, meaning that they do not share a signature of interest. It is therefore essential to efficiently identify these unproductive comparisons as rapidly as possible and exclude them from more time-intensive similarity calculations. The Blazing Signature Filter (BSF) is a highly efficient pairwise similarity algorithm which enables extensive data mining within a reasonable amount of time. The algorithm transforms datasets into binary metrics, allowing it to utilize the computationally efficient bit operators and provide a coarse measure of similarity. As a result, the BSF can scale to high dimensionality and rapidly filter unproductive pairwise comparison. Two bioinformatics applications of the tool are presented to demonstrate the ability to scale to billions of pairwise comparisons and the usefulness of this approach.

bioinformatics↗