Within the Human Protein Atlas project, antibodies are used to study the localization of protein in human tissues and cells. To generate the antibodies recombinant expression clones are produced from human RNA pools by cDNA synthesis, cloning and plasmid purification. These clones produce what is called Protein Epitope Signature Tags (PrESTs), a selected part of the target protein that should be recognized by antibodies.

Johan Rockberg, Associate Professor in antibody technology and directed evolution at KTH - Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden is the group leader for the epitope mapping and therapeutic antibodies group within the Human Protein Atlas...Read more

Today, we start a "mini-series" about our Tissue Atlas here at the blog. Join us on a tour through the lab, meet some of the people working there, and see some really nice images produced by the scientists.

All the work on our Tissue Atlas is done at our Uppsala site, with Cecilia Lindskog as site director. You can learn all about her in one of our previous blog posts.

First we meet research engineer IngMarie Olsson who is group leader for the Tissue Microarray Production, Immunohistochemistry, and Scanning-group...Read more

This month, the online magazine Labiotech.eu writes about scientists who translates science from academia to the market. While there are a many academic entrepreneurial superstars in the US, Labiotech.eu points out that there are also some academic researchers in Europe that have been successful in taking their findings into the biotech industry and lists ten individuals in Europe who have been successful at co-founding biotech companies.

Out of these ten persons, no less than three have connections to Sweden. Emanuelle Charpentier, co-discoverer of CRISPR, did some of her findings at Umeå University...Read more

Today we meet Hanna Tegel, site director at the AlbaNova site of the Human Protein Atlas, and group leader of the Antigen and Antibody Factory group. She has been with the Human Protein Atlas from the very beginning, and her career has evolved alongside the project.

– I took my M.Sc. in biotechnology at KTH – the Royal Institute of Technology here in Stockholm, and in the end of my education I complemented it with some physiology at the Karolinska Institute. As a part of this course I did a project at KTH, and when it was time for me to do my masters thesis I turned to the same professor. Now he was involved in the start-up of the Human Protein Atlas project...Read more

In a recent publication in Journal of Proteome Research, researchers from the Cell Profiling group of the Human Protein Atlas team present a new approach for validation of antibodies for bioimaging applications.

Antibodies are indispensible research tools, yet the scientific community has not adopted standardized procedures to validate their specificity. Here the researchers present a strategy to systematically validate antibodies for immunofluorescence applications using gene tagging.

Marie Skogs is the first author of the study.

– After a M. Sc...Read more

To prepare all the images for the Cell Atlas, released on December 4, the cells used are primed for staining and microscopy. Sample preparation is an important step when performing immunofluorescence studies. If wrongly applied it can not only cause unsuccessful detection but also generate misleading information.

The sample preparation performed by the Cell Atlas team includes cell fixation, permeabilization, and immunostaining with primary and secondary antibodies.

– The fixation is the crucial step, and different fixation protocols work better for different sets of proteins, Christian Gnann, a research engineer in the Cell Profiling group explains...Read more