Media

• Publications
• Latest News

Establishing international standards for protein affinity reagents

As the scientific community tries to improve the conduct of scientific research in the information age, formal standards are required to ensure that valuable experimental data is widely available to inform future experimental design.

An international scientific collaboration including Conway postdoctoral researcher, Dr Niall Haslam from the Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL) have devised a set of criteria that is seen as a positive first step towards formalising standards in reporting the production and properties of protein binding reagents such as antibodies.

The minimum information about protein affinity reagent (MIAPAR) proposal is essentially a checklist of required information, which was outlined earlier this year in a communication to Nature Biotechnology. By describing the properties of a protein binding reagent with every known binding partner, MIAPAR allows subsequent users to make a fully informed evaluation of the validity of the conclusions drawn using the particular product.

There is an ever widening range of affinity reagents available including monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies as well as an assortment of recombinant constructs. They are being used in a growing range of experimental methods such as enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), immunohistochemistry, Western blotting and affinity chromatography. The systematic characterisation of proteomes has also led to an increase in the scale of production of affinity reagents.

Currently, there are multiple sources of information on affinity reagents in existence including commercial catalogues, experimental results published in scientific journals and web portals that centralise affinity reagent properties from many sources. However, the available information may be incomplete, inaccessible, unsubstantiated or may even appear contradictory due to lack of precision in target or sample descriptions.

Dr Niall Haslam explains that “by providing MIAPAR compliment documents for the affinity reagents used in experiments along with the scientific communication of the research, scientists can support the efficient use of the products for the benefit of the entire scientific community.”

MIAPAR guidelines reflect other reporting guidelines that have developed as part of the Human Proteome Organisation Proteomics Standards Initiative (HUPO-PSI). The affinity reagent information should be structured to allow entry to databases, useful querying of these databases and automated analysis. They should conform to the standard naming conventions such as database accession numbers and controlled vocabularies.

Dr Haslam added, “We hope that these guidelines will encourage commercial suppliers of affinity reagents to supply MIAPAR compliant data with each purchase, ensuring clear and consistent information on the quality of products.”

The work on MIAPAR has been supported through funding received from European Union Framework Programmes (EU FP) 6 & 7.