Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery—That all started with de novo!

This work on solving the mystery of words encoded by amino acids in peptides was derived by the YPIC-EuPA Challenge. We received a dry synthetic peptide sample and performed a mass spectrometric analysis followed by de novo peptide sequencing. As a result, a part of “Rays of positive electricity and their application to chemical analyses” by J.J.Tomson was found to be encoded in the peptides of the sample. The words were first revealed from the peptides, that matched by Google search to find the answer. After that, the answer was validated using a standard proteomic search against a database constructed from the quotation found.