PIUS: peptide identification by unbiased search

We present PIUS, a tool that identifies peptides from tandem mass spectrometry data by analyzing the six-frame translation of a complete genome. It differs from earlier studies that have performed such a genomic search in two ways: (i) it considers a larger search space and (ii) it is designed for natural peptide identification rather than proteomics. Differently from other peptidomics tools designed for genome-wide searches, PIUS does not limit the analysis to a set of sequences that match a list of de novo reconstructions.