The group of University of California-San Diego students said the new area of bioinformatics is called "comparative proteogenomics," combining the fields of comparative genomics and proteomics, which is the study of all of an organism's proteins.

"This could be a powerful way to improve both genome and proteome annotations and to address notoriously difficult biological problems that remain outside the reach of previously proposed bioinformatics approaches," said Professor Pavel Pevzner, a computer science professor who organized the project. "Our bioinformatics undergraduates have shown that you can simultaneously analyze multiple genomes and proteomes, and use this information for scientific discovery."

The work appears in the journal Genome Research.