Investigating the uniqueness of peptides in human signal and bioactive peptides

The identification of unknown amino acid sequences of peptides as well as protein identification is of great significance in proteomics. Measured molecular masses from protein digestion techniques or from MS/MS analysis open the gates of proteome computational analysis. The uniqueness of a measured molecular mass or a peptide sequence plays a very important role in the fields of protein identification and peptide/protein-biomarker investigation. Furthermore, the property of uniqueness may give insights in the investigation of biological mechanisms. Here we present the application of two computational proteomics web services that we have developed in the investigation of uniqueness of peptides in two data sets of specific interest: The human signal peptide database and a set of published human bioactive peptides. It turns out that all of them are unique in the human proteome and furthermore, in their vast majority they are unique in human when searching across all species.