Surrogate antigens as targets for proteome-wide binder selection

In the past decade, many initiatives were taken for the development of antibodies for proteome-wide studies, as well as characterisation and validation of clinically relevant disease biomarkers. Phage display offers many advantages compared to antibody generation by immunisation because it is an unlimited resource of affinity reagents without batch-to-batch variation and is also amendable for high throughput in contrast to conventional hybridoma technology. One of the major bottlenecks to proteome-wide binder selection is the limited supply of suitable target antigens representative of the human proteome. Here, we provide proof of principle of using easily accessible, cancer-associated protein epitope signature tags (PrESTs), routinely generated within the Human Protein Atlas project, as surrogate antigens for full-length proteins in phage selections for the retrieval of target-specific binders. These binders were subsequently tested in western blot, immunohistochemistry and protein microarray application to demonstrate their functionality

Defining the transcriptome and proteome in three functionally different human cell lines

An essential question in human biology is how cells and tissues differ in gene and protein expression and how these differences delineate specific biological function. Here, we have performed a global analysis of both mRNA and protein levels based on sequence-based transcriptome analysis (RNA-seq), SILAC-based mass spectrometry analysis and antibody-based confocal microscopy. The study was performed in three functionally different human cell lines and based on the global analysis, we estimated the fractions of mRNA and protein that are cell specific or expressed at similar/different levels in the cell lines. A highly ubiquitous RNA expression was found with >60% of the gene products detected in all cells. The changes of mRNA and protein levels in the cell lines using SILAC and RNA ratios show high correlations, even though the genome-wide dynamic range is substantially higher for the proteins as compared with the transcripts. Large general differences in abundance for proteins from various functional classes are observed and, in general, the cell-type specific proteins are low abundant and highly enriched for cell-surface proteins. Thus, this study shows a path to characterize the transcriptome and proteome in human cells from different origins