< No: 28 >
2018


Wellness profiling and precision medicine

The use of affinity tags for purification of recombinant fusion proteins was first described in 1983 using protein A as a purification tag. The use of affinity tags, including polyhistidine tags (His-tags), has since become widespread as a versatile tool in bioscience, and many tens of thousands of articles have been published on this concept. For the Human Protein Atlas (HPA) effort, the concept was used to generate more than 50,000 recombinant proteins with a histidine affinity tag. These proteins were in the HPA program used for immunizations to generate antibodies to most of the proteins in the human body.

Key publication

  • Tebani A et al., Integration of molecular profiles in a longitudinal wellness profiling cohort. Nature Communications (2020)
    DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18148-7

Other selected publications

  • Neiman M et al., Individual and stable autoantibody repertoires in healthy individuals. Autoimmunity. (2019)
    PubMed: 30835561 DOI: 10.1080/08916934.2019.1581774

  • Zhong W et al., Dramatic changes in blood protein levels during the first week of life in extremely preterm infants. Pediatr Res. (2020)
    PubMed: 32330929 DOI: 10.1038/s41390-020-0912-8

  • Zhong W et al., Whole-genome sequence association analysis of blood proteins in a longitudinal wellness cohort. Genome Med. (2020)
    PubMed: 32576278 DOI: 10.1186/s13073-020-00755-0

  • Dodig-Crnković T et al., Facets of individual-specific health signatures determined from longitudinal plasma proteome profiling. EBioMedicine. (2020)
    PubMed: 32629387 DOI: 10.1016/j.ebiom.2020.102854



Figure legend: Chord diagram of the 50 most significant proteins related to body composition [bioimpedance fat, bioimpedance muscle, bioimpedance bone, weight, waist, and body mass index (BMI)] based on a longitudinal precision medicine study. The size of the link is defined as the absolute value of the coefficient of the corresponding effect, and proteins are sorted based on the coefficient calculated using mixed-effect modeling. Adapted from Zhong et al. (2020).


Key facts

  • 100 healthy individuals have been followed longitudinally during 2 years with multiple samplings
  • 200 extremely preterm children have been followed with multiple sampling after birth
  • More than 100 proteins have been identified in which variation in plasma levels is genetically determined