Complete and Exact Peptide Sequence Analysis Based on Propositional Logic

Peptides are the short polymeric molecules constituting all the proteins. They are formed by the linking of amino acids, and the determination of the amino acid sequence of a peptide is a fundamental issue in many areas of chemistry, medicine and biology. Nowadays, the prevalent approach to this problem consists in using a mass spectrometry analysis. This gives information about the molecular weight of the full peptidic molecule and of its fragments. Such information should be used in order to find the sequence, but this constitutes, in the general case, a difficult mathematical problem. After a brief overview of the approaches proposed in literature, and of their features and limits, the chapter describes in detail a promising one based on propositional logic. Differently from the others, this approach can be proved to be complete and exact.