Wilson Wen Bin Goh

Proteomic studies characterize the protein composition of complex biological samples. Despite recent advancements in mass spectrometry instrumentation and computational tools, low proteome coverage and interpretability remains a challenge. To address this, we developed Proteome Support Vector Enrichment (PROSE), a fast, scalable and lightweight pipeline for scoring proteins based on orthogonal gene co-expression network matrices. PROSE utilizes simple protein lists as input, generating a standard enrichment score for all proteins, including undetected ones. In our benchmark with 7 other candidate prioritization techniques, PROSE shows high accuracy in missing protein prediction, with scores correlating strongly to corresponding gene expression data. As a further proof-of-concept, we applied PROSE to a reanalysis of the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia proteomics dataset, where it captures key phenotypic features, including gene dependency. We lastly demonstrated its applicability on a breast cancer clinical dataset, showing clustering by annotated molecular subtype and identification of putative drivers of triple-negative breast cancer. PROSE is available as a user-friendly Python module from https://github.com/bwbio/PROSE.