A new research program has been started to produce all the human secreted proteins in mammalian cell factories. The program aims to facilitate studies of this important class of proteins involved in many human diseases.

The human secreted proteins, sometimes called the "secretome", consist of approximately 3000 proteins, which are produced inside our cells and then often transported out to the blood. This class of proteins is important in many central processes in humans, including bacterial and viral defense, inflammation, cell signaling and transport of nutrients...Read more

Today we meet Hanna Tegel, site director at the AlbaNova site of the Human Protein Atlas, and group leader of the Antigen and Antibody Factory group. She has been with the Human Protein Atlas from the very beginning, and her career has evolved alongside the project.

– I took my M.Sc. in biotechnology at KTH – the Royal Institute of Technology here in Stockholm, and in the end of my education I complemented it with some physiology at the Karolinska Institute. As a part of this course I did a project at KTH, and when it was time for me to do my masters thesis I turned to the same professor. Now he was involved in the start-up of the Human Protein Atlas project...Read more

Secreted and membrane-bound proteins are important for physiological processes and are potential drug targets as they are easily accessible in the extracellular space and provide a gateway to the intracellular environment. About 3,000 protein-coding genes are predicted members of the secretome; examples of secreted proteins are cytokines, coagulation factors, hormones, and growth factors. Important members of the membrane proteome, consisting of about 5,500 genes encoding predicted membrane-bound proteins, are ion channels of molecular transporters, enzymes, receptors, and anchors for other proteins.

A majority of the human genes encode several splice variants...Read more