2nd Annual Protein Capture Reagents Network Meeting

National Institutes of Health

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

2^nd Annual Protein Capture Reagents Network Meeting

December 10-11, 2012

Rockville, MD

Purpose:  Consortium members of the NIH Common Fund’s Protein Capture Reagents Program to present research and production progress, and to outline plans to improve network structure, with the aim of positioning the program to be scaled up in a second phase.

Background: Protein capture reagents have been widely used in basic research and clinical applications.  The need for developing a large library of protein capture reagents and for improving the technology for generating these reagents has been expressed at large by the scientific community.  While a number of approaches to generating protein affinity reagents exist; current limitations of quality, cost and throughput represent significant roadblocks to the development of a comprehensive and broadly applicable resource of renewable affinity reagents to all human proteins. The overall goal of the Protein Capture Reagents program is to pilot whether a community resource of low cost, high quality, renewable affinity reagents can be generated for all human proteins, and to develop technologies that will lead to next generation platforms for producing renewable protein capture reagents.  This pilot effort includes the generation of affinity reagents against human transcription factors as a test case. Thus, this pilot on its own is intended to produce a resource of considerable utility to the community; as human TFs represent an important sub-proteome, with major efforts underway worldwide, particularly to understand transcriptional regulation of genes for fundamental biological and disease knowledge.