In a paper published today in Science, a global consortium led by Mathias Uhlén (Stockholm Royal Institute of Technology) presents the latest edition of the Human Protein Atlas (HPA). The resource now contains data on roughly 17,000 proteins in 44 human tissues and organs, including over 13 million immunohistochemistry images annotated by pathologists.
HPA includes RDF data in this release, a significant move towards FAIR Data. The initial steps of “FAIRification” of the Human Protein Atlas were taken during the first edition of DTL/ELIXIR’s Bring Your Own Data workshops. The collaboration didn’t end there: coordinated by DTL, the HPA data team at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab, Sweden), the BioSemantics Group at LUMC/ ErasmusMC and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) joined forces to create RDF of HPA data.
The announcement of the new release last November was conceived with great interest by the media (f.i. BBC, The Economist, New Scientist), in particular the discovery that the testes produce more unique proteins than the human brain.