Alison Chaves
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alisonchaves.bsky.social
Alison Chaves
@alisonchaves.bsky.social
Doing proteomics until I still can.
https://github.com/41ison
Pinned
It's now properly published. If you want to easily check important characteristics of your data before diving into complicated statistics, check out PSManalyst.

PSManalyst: A Dashboard for Visual Quality Control of FragPipe Results | Journal of Proteome Research pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
PSManalyst: A Dashboard for Visual Quality Control of FragPipe Results
FragPipe is recognized as one of the fastest computational platforms in proteomics, making it a practical solution for the rapid quality control of high-throughput sample analyses. Starting with version 23.0, FragPipe introduced the “Generate Summary Report” feature, offering .pdf reports with essential quality control metrics to address the challenge of intuitively assessing large-scale proteomics data. While traditional spreadsheet formats (e.g., tsv files) are accessible, the complexity of the data often limits user-friendly interpretation. To further enhance accessibility, PSManalyst, a Shiny-based R application, was developed to process FragPipe output files (psm.tsv, protein.tsv, and combined_protein.tsv) and provide interactive, code-free data visualization. Users can filter peptide-spectrum matches (PSMs) by quality scores, visualize protease cleavage fingerprints as heatmaps and SeqLogos, and access a range of quality control metrics and representations such as peptide length distributions, ion densities, mass errors, and wordclouds for overrepresented peptides. The tool facilitates seamless switching between PSM and protein data visualization, offering insights into protein abundance discrepancies, samplewise similarity metrics, protein coverage, and contaminants evaluation. PSManalyst leverages several R libraries (lsa, vegan, ggfortify, ggseqlogo, wordcloud2, tidyverse, ggpointdensity, and plotly) and runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, requiring only a local R setup and an IDE. The app is available at (https://github.com/41ison/PSManalyst.
pubs.acs.org
Shout out to Débora for the fantastic work with the N-glycoproteomics of 7 Bothrops Snake Venoms.

N-Glycoproteomic Portraits of Bothrops Snake Venoms Reveal Evolutionarily Conserved and Divergent Phenotypes | Journal of Proteome Research pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
N-Glycoproteomic Portraits of Bothrops Snake Venoms Reveal Evolutionarily Conserved and Divergent Phenotypes
Glycosylation is a major protein post-translational modification in snake venom proteins and contributes to the diversification of proteomes. In this study, we carried out an in-depth analysis of the glycosylation profile of seven Bothrops venoms, including neutral sugar quantification, glycoprotein profiling by lectin blot, and determination of N-glycosylation sites in proteins and their N-glycan compositions, by direct, intact glycopeptide analysis by mass spectrometry. Interestingly, all identified N-glycosylated peptides were from enzymatic venom components, mainly proteolytic enzymes that are key in envenomation. All venoms revealed a prominent occurrence of fucose and sialic acid in all N-glycosylated toxins identified. The results indicated that in Bothrops venoms, there is an important level of variation in protein primary structure that is not restricted to regions containing N-sequons. Overall, the signatures of N-glycosylated and nonglycosylated peptide backbones and of N-glycan site occupation by different N-glycans revealed conservation of venom phenotype framework and diversification of N-glycan usage. Hence, the molecular mechanisms of toxin structure and function evolution are at the same time dynamic in that they involve a fine-tuning for the presence of distinct glycans as an evolutionary novelty and are subjected to some conservation that results in the clustering of Bothrops venoms according to the species phylogenetic classification.
pubs.acs.org
November 7, 2025 at 7:54 PM
Reposted by Alison Chaves
Are you using any of our factor models, such as MOFA? 🛵
You might’ve found it challenging to tailor them to your specific use cases - not anymore!

Introducing MOFA-FLEX: a flexible, modular factor analysis framework designed for customizable modeling across diverse multi-omics data scenarios. 1/n
November 7, 2025 at 10:29 AM
Reposted by Alison Chaves
The next Ubuntu Proteomics Summer School will take place in George, South Africa! Hear more about it here:
youtube.com/shorts/4M9uZ...

To register go to:
ubuntuproteomics.co.za/registration...

#proteomics #summerschool #SouthAfrica
October 27, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Thermo users, have you ever seen this type of error on the Exploris series? I've heard it's common and may require replacing some PCB. Any tips?
#MS
October 20, 2025 at 6:58 PM
Reposted by Alison Chaves
Struggling to compare Bruker timsTOF methods or extract window schemes from raw .d files? I developed a free desktop tool to solve this: timsCompare! 🚀

It automates the manual work of extracting method parameters, presenting them in a structured and comparable view.

(A thread 🧵)
October 15, 2025 at 11:01 AM
I can't find the actual publication, but it is quite impressive the level of "don't give a f*" that MDPI gives to peer-review process. Look at the Fig 4 in this one: www.mdpi.com/2079-6382/14... (a mitochondria inside a bacteria!)
October 6, 2025 at 12:28 AM
A great contribution for de novo field
September 25, 2025 at 9:54 PM
Really need to thank Zhou and cols. Great inspiration on how to represent PSM features in protein sequences freely available to the community.
PepMapViz: a versatile toolkit for peptide mapping, visualization, and comparative exploration url: academic.oup.com/bioinformati...
PepMapViz: a versatile toolkit for peptide mapping, visualization, and comparative exploration
AbstractSummary. PepMapViz is a versatile R package that provides flexible peptide mapping and visualization capabilities. PepMapViz can import peptide dat
academic.oup.com
September 18, 2025 at 12:34 AM
Quick check: Is it common for your institutions for the competition announcement to require candidates to collaborate with very specific people (including their names)? Apparently, USP in São Paulo-Brazil has a very specific interest for faculty position as assistant professor.
August 29, 2025 at 7:39 PM
It's now properly published. If you want to easily check important characteristics of your data before diving into complicated statistics, check out PSManalyst.

PSManalyst: A Dashboard for Visual Quality Control of FragPipe Results | Journal of Proteome Research pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
PSManalyst: A Dashboard for Visual Quality Control of FragPipe Results
FragPipe is recognized as one of the fastest computational platforms in proteomics, making it a practical solution for the rapid quality control of high-throughput sample analyses. Starting with version 23.0, FragPipe introduced the “Generate Summary Report” feature, offering .pdf reports with essential quality control metrics to address the challenge of intuitively assessing large-scale proteomics data. While traditional spreadsheet formats (e.g., tsv files) are accessible, the complexity of the data often limits user-friendly interpretation. To further enhance accessibility, PSManalyst, a Shiny-based R application, was developed to process FragPipe output files (psm.tsv, protein.tsv, and combined_protein.tsv) and provide interactive, code-free data visualization. Users can filter peptide-spectrum matches (PSMs) by quality scores, visualize protease cleavage fingerprints as heatmaps and SeqLogos, and access a range of quality control metrics and representations such as peptide length distributions, ion densities, mass errors, and wordclouds for overrepresented peptides. The tool facilitates seamless switching between PSM and protein data visualization, offering insights into protein abundance discrepancies, samplewise similarity metrics, protein coverage, and contaminants evaluation. PSManalyst leverages several R libraries (lsa, vegan, ggfortify, ggseqlogo, wordcloud2, tidyverse, ggpointdensity, and plotly) and runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, requiring only a local R setup and an IDE. The app is available at (https://github.com/41ison/PSManalyst.
pubs.acs.org
August 15, 2025 at 7:45 PM
Editors with high retraction rates, undeclared COI, authorship concerns...
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Exclusive: retraction-prone editors identified at megajournal PLoS ONE
Study says small editor group handled many problematic manuscripts — and a Nature investigation finds out who they are.
www.nature.com
August 7, 2025 at 1:11 PM
From the toxinology POV it is nice to see the toxins distribution from the body parts other than venom glands (common in some animals). Good to see it published.
Backyard Proteomics: A Case Study with the Black Widow Spider | Journal of Proteome Research pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
pubs.acs.org
July 29, 2025 at 12:34 PM
How bad is this idea? The journal obligates authors to use a pattern term in the title! When I think these are the highest degree educated people!
July 27, 2025 at 2:15 PM
If you are doing proteomics/peptidomics with de novo search, the pepAligner tool will let you map peptides to proteins using Levenshtein distance for amino acid substitution and Grantham distances for exclude implausible substitutions.
github.com/41ison/pepAl...
GitHub - 41ison/pepAligner: Matche peptide sequences from a list to protein sequences from a FASTA file.
Matche peptide sequences from a list to protein sequences from a FASTA file. - 41ison/pepAligner
github.com
July 26, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Is anyone giving attention to this Mascot DIA spectrum-centric algorithm? What is the deal with it? I'm not buying the "unlimited" search.
www.matrixscience.com/blog/the-pro...
The promise of spectrum-centric DIA
www.matrixscience.com
July 21, 2025 at 7:28 PM
Is it just me, or does the Cascadia algorithm for DIA de novo doesn't work in any other OS than Linux?
July 19, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Using QuantUMS filtering in DIA-NN will decrease the number of proteins but will improve your quantification. Also, want to know how DIA-NN evolved? I guess you may find our latest publication informative.

50 tokens: pubs.acs.org/articlesonre...
JPR: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Decoding the Impact of Isolation Window Selection and QuantUMS Filtering in DIA-NN for DIA Quantification of Peptides and Proteins
Proteomic studies using data-independent acquisition (DIA) have gained momentum in all fields of biology. Search engines are evolving to keep up with the latest developments in instrument technology. DIA-NN is the most popular software for DIA analysis under an academic use license. The QuantUMS algorithm in DIA-NN improves quantification quality control by calculating three scores (protein group MaxLFQ quality, empirical quality, and quantity quality) that assess the agreement between MS1 and MS2 features. Here, we show that applying specific cutoffs to these scores can significantly impact the results. To enable you to make a more informed decision about what represents a reasonable trade-off (identification and quantification), we evaluated the impact of different combinations of the scores on data acquired using different isolation windows and a mixture of two species with a known ratio. To test consistency and reproducibility across the six different versions of DIA-NN, we compared them and found high reproducibility except for version 1.9. We show that filtering by QuantUMS scores removes proteins with low abundances and high coefficients of variation. Finally, we developed the QC4DIANN Shiny application in the R language for interactive quality control automation.
pubs.acs.org
July 9, 2025 at 12:16 PM
Interesting reading.
⏰ Free access to read & download thru August 20 the final published version of Wendy Parker & my paper "Understanding Data Uncertainty" at this link ⬇️
authors.elsevier.com/c/1lMUI8yuR6...

#philsci #metasci 🧪 ⚒️
July 1, 2025 at 11:11 PM
Does someone in the proteomics field have experience using those Fourier transform to amino acid sequence alignment (e.g. MAFFT) that could say if it's worth spending time to implement it on proteoform investigation?
#proteomics
#bioinformatics
#genomics
June 29, 2025 at 3:11 PM
Our latest results explain how Bothrops jararaca venom damages the kidneys. Take a look :)
Signatures of the systemic effects of a snake venom and antivenom: multiomics profiling of the kidney pathology - Molecular & Cellular Proteomics www.mcponline.org/article/S153...
Signatures of the systemic effects of a snake venom and antivenom: multiomics profiling of the kidney pathology
Animal venoms comprise many toxins that work in concert to break apart the robust homeostatic systems of prey organisms. Conversely, prey organisms actively antagonize each step of envenoming, which d...
www.mcponline.org
June 27, 2025 at 6:04 PM
Yep, it should be the common place for every journal. If there are conflicts of interest, they will be transparent; if there are bad reviews, they should be visible to everyone, so the journal will not repeat the mistake.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers
From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science.
www.nature.com
June 18, 2025 at 10:56 AM
Our new publication offers evidence at the protein level for the existence of over 4k seq in the Pb18 database. Neglected tropical diseases agents deserve attention.
Proteomic Changes in Paracoccidioides brasiliensis Induced by Fludioxonil | Journal of Proteome Research pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Proteomic Changes in Paracoccidioides brasiliensis Induced by Fludioxonil
Paracoccidioides brasiliensis is a pathogenic fungus capable of thermodimorphic transition, causing systemic mycoses in humans. Fludioxonil, a phenylpyrrole fungicide, inhibits this transition and aff...
pubs.acs.org
June 15, 2025 at 5:35 PM
Another trivial and still useful application for routine protein estimation calculations. Pay attention to the input files. The standard curve and samples values must be provided separately, and the blank absorbances must be declared manually. It can help your students.
github.com/41ison/Prote...
April 14, 2025 at 1:59 AM