Matrix Science
Home Mascot Help  
   
  Help > Quantitation > Precursor protocol   
 
 
 
Quantitation topics
Overview
Report format
Configuration
Statistical procedures
Reporter protocol
Precursor protocol
Multiplex protocol
Replicate protocol
emPAI protocol
Average protocol
 

Quantitation: Precursor protocol

Quantitation based on the relative intensities of extracted ion chromatograms (XICs) for precursors within a single data set. This is by far the most widely used protocol, which can be used with any chemistry that creates a precursor mass shift. For example,

The precursor protocol requires information from the raw data file that is not present in the peak list, so the quantitation report is generated in Mascot Distiller, which has access to both the Mascot search results and the raw data.

Ideally, the raw data should be true profile data. Many users of Thermo instruments save centroided data to the raw file, because this makes the files much smaller. For high resolution instruments, such as Orbitrap and FTMS, this is not a problem. For standard trap data, it can make it difficult to get good quantitation results unless the original peak detection was reliable.

Where to begin

You need Mascot Distiller, including the Search Toolbox and Quantitation Toolbox, and access to a Mascot 2.2 Server. You can automate the peak picking and Mascot search submission using Mascot Daemon (except for multi-file projects), but you have to open the resulting Distiller project file to generate the final quantitation report. Automation of this final step will be possible once Mascot 2.3 is released.

Configuration tips

  • An updated copy of quantitation.xml is available for your in-house Mascot Server. (Right click the link and choose Save As.)
  • It is not unusual to get MS/MS for just one component of a pair. Check Allow mass time match to enable the partner to be inferred from its predicted mass.
  • Do not check Allow elution shift unless your tag includes Deuterium, which causes a systematic shift in elution time. With other tags, setting this option to true slows down processing and may degrade the results for weak signals that give noisy XIC's.

Examples

To see screen shots of examples of Precursor quantitation, refer to this presentation from our 2008 ASMS User Meeting

A better way to see how it works is to try Distiller on 30 day evaluation and follow through the tutorial in the help file. This uses data from a three component SILAC experiment acquired on an AB SCIEX QStar instrument. You can follow the tutorial and experiment with the processing settings even if you don't have an in-house Mascot 2.2 Server.

 
 
Copyright © 2010 Matrix Science Ltd. All Rights Reserved.