MSstatsBioNet: Integrating Statistical Analyses with Prior Knowledge Biomolecular Networks for Quantitative Proteomics and Phosphoproteomics

A common outcome of quantitative mass spectrometry-based proteomic and phosphoproteomic experiments is a list of proteins that are differentially abundant between conditions. However, biological interpretation requires evaluation in the context of prior knowledge of biological mechanisms and protein function. One approach to facilitate mechanistic biological interpretation is to integrate such lists with biological network databases, built from manually curated resources and text mining systems. This manuscript automates this process with MSstatsBioNet, a Bioconductor package that integrates MSstats, a family of open-source packages for detecting differentially abundant proteins, and INDRA, a system that extracts biomolecular networks from biomedical literature using text mining and merges those networks with the content of curated knowledge bases. Taking as input a list of differentially abundant proteins from MSstats, MSstatsBioNet retrieves a protein subnetwork from INDRA and overlays experimental fold changes onto the underlying subnetwork. Users can then interact with the network and overlaid data, interrogating primary literature evidence to construct granular mechanistic narratives for iterative hypothesis generation. We demonstrate the utility of this approach with three case studies, two measuring changes in protein abundance and one measuring changes in phosphorylation.