The mission of the Human Antibody Initiative (HAI) aims to promote and facilitate the use of antibodies for proteomics research. The initiative consists of two separate activities; (1) the generation of a catalogue of validated antibodies from many different sources and (2) a protein atlas for the expression and localization of human proteins in normal and disease tissue. The two separate activities have as their primary deliverables to generate databases with free public accessibility.
The Antibody Resource database (www.antibodypedia.org) is aimed to produce a comprehensive catalogue of validated antibodies towards human proteins. This initiative depends on input from a large number of academic groups and commercial companies. The Protein Atlas initiative (www.proteinatlas.org) is aimed to provide comprehensive and annotated database of high-resolution images showing tissue profiles in normal and cancer tissues. Both databases will be open to the public without restriction (no passwords).
The Antibodypedia portal is a database developed within the 6th framework EU program ProteomeBinders and the project is part of the HUPO antibody initiative (HAI). This pilot portal provides a web-based submission format to allow any antibody provider or user to submit data about antibodies with validation scores for various applications. It is only possible to submit antibodies available to the scientific community. The database relies on validation scores, submitted by the antibody provider or user, based on a standard set of validation criteria, but it is important to point out that the validation is subjective in nature.
It is thus mandatory to submit the primary data for applications with supportive or uncertain validation score, usually in the form of an image with text annotation, to allow the community to review the data behind the validation score.
Users are also allowed to send in comments to the portal about the use of a particular antibody and in this manner both positive and negative results from a particular antibody can be shared among the scientific community. No curation of the data is done in the first phase, but the plan is to incorporate an independent curation step to ensure that the formal submission rules have been followed.