A chromosome-centric analysis of antibodies directed toward the human proteome using Antibodypedia

Antibodies are crucial for the study of human proteins and have been defined as one of the three pillars in the human chromosome-centric Human Proteome Project (C-HPP). In this article the chromosome-centric structure has been used to analyze the availability of antibodies as judged by the presence within the portal Antibodypedia, a database designed to allow comparisons and scoring of publicly available antibodies toward human protein targets. This public database displays antibody data from more than one million antibodies toward human protein targets. A summary of the content in this knowledge resource reveals that there exist more than 10 antibodies to over 70% of all the putative human genes, evenly distributed over the 24 human chromosomes. The analysis also shows that at present, less than 10% of the putative human protein-coding genes (n = 1882) predicted from the genome sequence lack antibodies, suggesting that focused efforts from the antibody-based and mass spectrometry-based proteomic communities should be encouraged to pursue the analysis of these missing proteins. We show that Antibodypedia may be used to track the development of available and validated antibodies to the individual chromosomes, and thus the database is an attractive tool to identify proteins with no or few antibodies yet generated.