Peptide mass fingerprinting

Peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) is an analytic technique for protein identification. Proteins extracted from the proteome of a sample are individually digested using a protease into a series of smaller peptides. The set of masses of these peptide fragments is then measured with a mass spectrometer, forming a peptide mass fingerprint of the protein which can then be compared with known protein sequences for this organism in a protein sequence database.