Metadata Comparison Tool (MCT™) - Proteomic Data Analysis Tool

The MCT™ application analyzes multiple pair-wise comparisons of proteomic profiles, generated in DeltaVue. These individual pair-wise comparisons are uploaded into the MCT™ application as Excel spreadsheets exported from DeltaVue, following some simple manipulations as described in this section. It is important to follow these instructions exactly, as the MCT™ application expects the spreadsheet to be in the exact format arrived at here.

The main manipulation of the data that is performed here is to normalize the data values to the total amount of protein in each sample. For example, if you were to compare the peaks in sample A and B, and you had loaded twice as much A as B, then your data would be biased towards peaks that were “over-expressed” in A. The normalization performed here is akin to what is done when a Western blot is normalized to total protein loading. The advantage to the approach described here is that it is based on a post-fact measurement of protein observed rather than a pre-loading measurement. Total protein in the sample is derived from the area under the curve of the first dimension data set.