Therefore any protein match with a MOWSE score of 84 or greater will have less than a 5% chance of being an incorrect identification. The first 111 hits were considered to have been successfully identified, since they all displayed a MOWSE score of 85 or greater and, therefore, can be considered to be found in date palm (P. dactylifera L.) seed. However, on closer inspection, not all of these have been identified as a particular protein, with some being labelled as unknown proteins, and some hypothetical (identified from gene sequences) but which are nonetheless in the NCBI database. Other proteins failed the second criterion that more than one peptide is used in the identification. Once these proteins had been removed, along with contaminants, 90 unique proteins were identified. These 90 most abundant proteins were classified into twelve different groups according to their functions, using the categories described by Bevan et al. (1998). The different functional group classifications and percentages found in the DSPC are show in Table 1.