The Winner of the 2020 Data Mineathon Challenge/ #ALSMinePTMs is.....

First of all, I can't thank everyone enough for putting up with the chaos that was #ALSMinePTMs. 

Thank you judges! 

Thank you random friends who helped me evaluate some of the data and filter it down for sending out to judging!

And most of all, thank you to the participants who downloaded files that I didn't properly set up access to at first, that I then posted incorrect meta-data for, and still used their valuable time to process this data and return results! 

We are working on the draft of a manuscript to actually summarize these results and more emails will be going out while we pull this awesome data together. 

This is an early observation that we're in the process of evaluating, but this might have been more than just a fun exercise. Some of these PTMs that were discovered look legitimately important to the understanding of this messed up disease and might strengthen some of the hypotheses of where it starts from (environmental exposure, as terrifying as that is). Preliminary analysis of another cohort definitely shows some of these peptides, but more work will be necessary to really check all this out, and that is in progress. 

Just to be clear if this is the first time you've heard of this. All the participants downloaed a proteomics dataset that was not enriched for PTMs and found PTMs in it, and we're validating the results and we're going to write a paper about it. That is the power of next generation proteomics data processing software. 

So. Thank you. 

But that's not what I'm typing about. This was a Challenge. And bragging rights are on the line AND

There were great submissions all around, but the top pick from the judges was a submission sent in by Dr. Sarah Haynes and the first 2 pages looked like this --- 

If you aren't using MSFragger/FragPipe, Philosopher and/or associated tools, I urge you to give them a look. Other tools found many of the same modifications that MSFragger did and that really resonated with the judges, but no tool found as many different classes of solidly confident PTMs. When multiple tools support what your analysis found but nothing found all the ones that you did, that's a super impressive, right? 

And the follow up analysis done by the team in support of their findings was really just top notch work. 

Again, I'll follow up with more later, but I wanted to get the winner announced and this part of the challenge wrapped up. 

A huge congratulations to this team, and another huge thank you to the people who made this possible. 

And....strangely...it looks like a real institution is interested in this challenge and maybe providing resources to keep it going, so it really might have been the 1st Annual Proteomics Data Minethon Challenge Thing!