Generation and validation of affinity reagents on a proteome‐wide level

Abstract

There is a need for protein‐specific affinity reagents to explore the gene products encoded by the genome. Recently, systematic efforts to generate validated affinity reagents on a whole human proteome level have been initiated. There are several issues for such efforts, including choice of antigen, type of affinity reagent, and the subsequent validation of the generated protein‐specific binders. The advantages and disadvantages with the different approaches are discussed and the problems related to quality assessment of antibodies to be used in multi‐platform applications are addressed. This review also describes the efforts to create a virtual resource of validated antibodies using a community‐based portal and summarizes the status and visions for the publicly available human protein atlas ( http://www.proteinatlas.org) showing the human protein profiles in a large number of normal and cancer tissues as well as a large set of human cell lines. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.