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Main Authors: Sanders, Justin, Yilmaz, Melih, Russell, Jacob H., Bittremieux, Wout, Fondrie, William E., Riley, Nicholas M., Oh, Sewoong, Noble, William Stafford
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10848
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author Sanders, Justin
Yilmaz, Melih
Russell, Jacob H.
Bittremieux, Wout
Fondrie, William E.
Riley, Nicholas M.
Oh, Sewoong
Noble, William Stafford
author_facet Sanders, Justin
Yilmaz, Melih
Russell, Jacob H.
Bittremieux, Wout
Fondrie, William E.
Riley, Nicholas M.
Oh, Sewoong
Noble, William Stafford
contents Mass spectrometry is the dominant technology in the field of proteomics, enabling high-throughput analysis of the protein content of complex biological samples. Due to the complexity of the instrumentation and resulting data, sophisticated computational methods are required for the processing and interpretation of acquired mass spectra. Machine learning has shown great promise to improve the analysis of mass spectrometry data, with numerous purpose-built methods for improving specific steps in the data acquisition and analysis pipeline reaching widespread adoption. Here, we propose unifying various spectrum prediction tasks under a single foundation model for mass spectra. To this end, we pre-train a spectrum encoder using de novo sequencing as a pre-training task. We then show that using these pre-trained spectrum representations improves our performance on the four downstream tasks of spectrum quality prediction, chimericity prediction, phosphorylation prediction, and glycosylation status prediction. Finally, we perform multi-task fine-tuning and find that this approach improves the performance on each task individually. Overall, our work demonstrates that a foundation model for tandem mass spectrometry proteomics trained on de novo sequencing learns generalizable representations of spectra, improves performance on downstream tasks where training data is limited, and can ultimately enhance data acquisition and analysis in proteomics experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10848
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Foundation model for mass spectrometry proteomics
Sanders, Justin
Yilmaz, Melih
Russell, Jacob H.
Bittremieux, Wout
Fondrie, William E.
Riley, Nicholas M.
Oh, Sewoong
Noble, William Stafford
Machine Learning
Mass spectrometry is the dominant technology in the field of proteomics, enabling high-throughput analysis of the protein content of complex biological samples. Due to the complexity of the instrumentation and resulting data, sophisticated computational methods are required for the processing and interpretation of acquired mass spectra. Machine learning has shown great promise to improve the analysis of mass spectrometry data, with numerous purpose-built methods for improving specific steps in the data acquisition and analysis pipeline reaching widespread adoption. Here, we propose unifying various spectrum prediction tasks under a single foundation model for mass spectra. To this end, we pre-train a spectrum encoder using de novo sequencing as a pre-training task. We then show that using these pre-trained spectrum representations improves our performance on the four downstream tasks of spectrum quality prediction, chimericity prediction, phosphorylation prediction, and glycosylation status prediction. Finally, we perform multi-task fine-tuning and find that this approach improves the performance on each task individually. Overall, our work demonstrates that a foundation model for tandem mass spectrometry proteomics trained on de novo sequencing learns generalizable representations of spectra, improves performance on downstream tasks where training data is limited, and can ultimately enhance data acquisition and analysis in proteomics experiments.
title Foundation model for mass spectrometry proteomics
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10848