Figure 4.

The fundamentals of Occam’s razor strategy (principle of maximum parsimony) in Proteomics, by which proteins can be related through shared matches, and used to create the final report of the identified proteins. (a) B is a subset of protein A. Protein B may be present in the sample, but there is no evidence for this, so parsimony may be dropped from the report. (b) Protein C can be considered as an “intersection protein” (i.e., a subset of the combined matches to A and B). By Occam’s razor, it may be discarded from the report because it is not identified by unique peptides.