After a brief hiatus in our occasional Spotlight series, we’re pleased to resume with an introduction to the Human Protein Atlas. This site has long been a plugin in the BioGPS plugin library. Thanks to Lisa Berglund for guiding us through the highlights of the HPA.
In one tweet or less, introduce us to your website.
The Human Protein Atlas is a publicly available web portal for exploration of protein expression profiles in human normal and diseased tissues and cells.Why is your database unique and special?
In the Human Protein Atlas, antibody-based expression profiles for >8000 human protein-coding genes in 48 normal human tissues, 20 cancer types and 59 cell lines and primary cells are available as high-resolution images together with aggregated information about the protein expression levels. The data is highly structured and searchable. There is, to our knowledge, no other database that provides similar information.Why did you create your website?
The website was created to make the protein expression profile data generated in our project publicly available. The data is available free of charge, no password is required to use the website, and you are all welcome to use the data in your research.Who is your target audience?
Our target audience is anyone interested in protein expression.What’s your greatest success story so far?
We are very happy to have succeeded in scaling up to now be able to generate and publish protein expression profiles for more than 2000 human protein-coding genes per year.What improvements are coming in the future?
Coming improvements to the website include better search functions, even more protein expression profiles and functions for batch download of the data.Who is the team behind your website?
Professor Mathias Uhlén at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, is the director for the Human Protein Atlas project. A team of almost 100 people, based in Stockholm, Uppsala and Mumbai, is involved in the generation of the protein expression profiles. The website development team, headed by Lisa Berglund, is Per Oksvold, Mattias Forsberg, Kalle Jonasson and Martin Zwahlen.
Thanks again to Lisa for telling us about the Human Protein Atlas, and be sure to check out the plugin in BioGPS.
