Antibody-based proteomics provides a powerful approach for the functional study of the human proteome involving the systematic generation of protein-specific affinity reagents. We used this strategy to construct a comprehensive, antibody-based protein atlas for expression and localization profiles in 48 normal human tissues and 20 different cancers. Here we report a new publicly available database containing, in the first version, ϳ400,000 high resolution images corresponding to more than 700 antibodies toward human proteins. Each image has been annotated by a certified pathologist to provide a knowledge base for functional studies and to allow queries about protein profiles in normal and disease tissues. Our results suggest it should be possible to extend this analysis to the majority of all human proteins thus providing a valuable tool for medical and biological research.

Here we show that an affinity proteomics strategy using affinity-purified antibodies raised against recombinant human protein fragments can be used for chromosomewide protein profiling. The approach is based on affinity reagents raised toward bioinformatics-designed protein epitope signature tags corresponding to unique regions of individual gene loci. The genes of human chromosome 21 identified by the genome efforts were investigated, and the success rates for de novo cloning, protein production, and antibody generation were 85, 76, and 56%, respectively. Using human tissue arrays, a systematic profiling of protein expression and subcellular localization was undertaken for the putative gene products. The results suggest that this affinity proteomics strategy can be used to produce a proteome atlas, describing distribution and expression of proteins in normal tissues as well as in common cancers and other forms of diseased tissues.

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