High specificity affinity reagents are essential probes for proteome research, because they allow the detection and localisation of multiple proteins in tissues and fluids in health
and disease. The technologies used for these approaches are collectively known as "Affinity Proteomics".
AffinityProteome is an EU FP7 collaborative research project between 5 academic partners and 6 commercial enterprises (5 SMEs) to develop tools and technologies for high-throughput research based on affinity reagents to study the human proteome.
This project focuses on resolving bottlenecks in the high throughput production of quality-controlled, recombinant binding molecules of different types (antibody fragments, engineered DARPin scaffolds, nucleic acid aptamers) with advanced applications (capture microarrays, multidimensional fluorescence imaging, single molecule detection, intracellular knockdown). The targets for binder production and analysis are the proteins of the TGF-ß and MAP kinase signal transduction pathways. (See Background for more details.)
Project number: 222635
Full title: Advanced affinity tools and technologies for high throughput studies of the human proteome
The AffinityProteome proposal was submitted in September 2007 to the Health call 2007-1.1-4 (SME-driven collaborative research projects for developing tools and technologies for high-throughput research) and was approved for negotiation in March 2008. Negotiations were completed and the contract issued in January 2009 and the project started on 1st March 2009. AffinityProteome is scheduled to run for 3 years.