Meeting Seeks to Boost Interest in the Human Proteome Project

Participants in the Human Proteome Project (HPP), a global collaboration among proteomics researchers to map the entire human proteome over the next 5 to 10 years, met in Geneva, Switzerland, at the beginning of September 2011.

The HPP meeting was held as part of a workshop sponsored by AB SCIEX (Framingham, MA, USA), a global leader in life science analytical technologies, and a member of the HPP’s Industry Advisory Board.

HPP is a Human Proteome Organization (Montreal, Canada) initiative that aims to assign and characterize all proteins in the human body. To accomplish this feat the research will proceed in two main directions: chromosome-based HPP (cHPP), focusing on annotating subsets of proteins for each chromosome, and biology disease-driven HPP (bdHPP), aiming to answer biological and disease-related questions.

The practical work of identifying, quantifying, and annotating all human protein-coding genes, the will be accomplished with three primary tools: mass spectrometry, antibody affinity, and bioinformatics. For each of these methods the HPP will be publishing guidelines with recommendations for experimental procedures, sample handling, and data analysis.

The major challenges for the HPP at this time are the need to convince enough large research laboratories to join the consortium, and to ensure sufficient quantitation in order to develop large-scale databases. The ultimate goal is to produce high-quality results that will be universally available to researchers all over the world. In the long term, the HPP aims to take proteomics beyond research and into clinical applications.

Related Links:
AB SCIEX
Human Proteome Organization