The Proteios Software Environment: An Extensible Multiuser Platform for Management and Analysis of Proteomics Data

Proteome analysis involves many steps that generate large quantities of data in different formats. This creates a need for automatic data merging and extraction of important features from data. Furthermore, metadata need to be collected and reported to enable critical evaluation of results. Many data analysis tools are developed locally in research laboratories and are nontrivial to adapt for other laboratories, preventing optimal exploitation of generated data. The proteomics field would benefit from user-friendly analysis and data management platforms in which method developers can make their analysis tools available for the community. Here, we describe the Proteios Software Environment (ProSE) that is built around a Web-based local data repository for proteomics experiments. The application features sample tracking, project sharing between multiple users, and automated data merging and analysis. ProSE has built-in support for several quantitative proteomics workflows, and integrates searching in several search engines, automated combination of the search results with predetermined false discovery rates, annotation of proteins and submission of results to public repositories. ProSE also provides a programming interface to enable local extensions, as well as database access using Web services. ProSE provides an analysis platform for proteomics research and is targeted for multiuser projects with needs to share data, sample tracking, and analysis result. ProSE is open source software available at http://www.proteios.org .