Today, the Human Protein Atlas consortium launched version 15 of the database including extensive transcriptomics data and a new display view to allow comparisons of human tissue profiles on both the RNA and protein level.

The launch is accompanied with an article in Molecular Systems Biology describing transcriptome resources with a focus on the comparison between the datasets generated from the Broad Institute, Boston, US (GTEx) and the Human Protein Atlas consortium at Science for Life Laboratory, Sweden.

The Human Protein Atlas includes proteome analysis based on more than 25 000 antibodies targeting more than 17 000 unique proteins, combined with transcriptome analysis covering all
20 000 human protein coding genes. In the new version it is now possible to do comparisons of primary data from several sources, including external efforts.

The GTEx dataset includes more than 1 600 postmortem samples from mostly overlapping, but in some cases unique, tissues compared to the Human Protein Atlas consortium. RNA-seq data from 28 of the GTEx tissues with a corresponding tissue in Human Protein Atlas have been included to allow for direct comparisons between the Human Protein Atlas and GTEx data sets.

”The inclusion of the GTEx dataset to the Human Protein Atlas database makes it even more comprehensive and it is reassuring that there is a significant overlap in the tissue classification of the genes based on the two independent datasets,” says professor Mathias Uhlén, program director for the Human Protein Atlas project.

The article published in Molecular Systems Biology discusses publicly available human transcriptome resources and the possible use of these databases for various applications, such as building genome-scale metabolic models used for analyzing cell and tissue functions both in health an in disease contexts.

Read the article in Molecular Systems Biology: http://msb.embopress.org/content/msb/12/4/862.full.pdf

 

The Human Protein Atlas:  http://www.proteinatlas.org/

Source: SciLifeLab. Photo from The Human Protein Atlas