PHOXTRACK-a tool for interpreting comprehensive datasets of post-translational modifications of proteins.

Abstract

We introduce PHOXTRACK (PHOsphosite-X-TRacing Analysis of Causal Kinases), a user-friendly freely available software tool for analyzing large datasets of post-translational modifications of proteins, such as phosphorylation, which are commonly gained by mass spectrometry detection. In contrast to other currently applied data analysis approaches, PHOXTRACK uses full sets of quantitative proteomics data and applies non-parametric statistics to calculate whether defined kinase-specific sets of phosphosite sequences indicate statistically significant concordant differences between various biological conditions. PHOXTRACK is an efficient tool for extracting post-translational information of comprehensive proteomics datasets to decipher key regulatory proteins and to infer biologically relevant molecular pathways. PHOXTRACK will be maintained over the next years and is freely available as an online tool for non-commercial use at http://phoxtrack.molgen.mpg.de. Users will also find a tutorial at this Web site and can additionally give feedback at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/phoxtrack-discuss.