The Rise of Open Proteomics

Researchers at EMBL-EBI, Institute for Systems Biology and other partnering organizations have launched ProteomeXchange, a public portal for exchanging proteomics data generated from mass-spectrometry experiments and other related information. From the EMBL-EBI-issued press release:

Eric Deutsch, head of PeptideAtlas at the Institute for Systems Biology in the U.S., says: “I’m certain that the ProteomeXchange system is already leading to greater awareness and reuse of publicly available datasets. I’m regularly contacted by people who want to explore new data they’ve heard about through our alert system, and am pleased to see so much growth in this area of science.” Read full press release.

As part of the launch, the consortium also published a correspondence piece in Nature Biotechnology (published online on March 10, 2014). An excerpt:

“There is a growing trend toward public dissemination of proteomics data, which is facilitating the assessment, reuse, comparative analyses and extraction of new findings from published data. This process has been mainly driven by journal publication guidelines and funding agencies. However, there is a need for better integration of public repositories and coordinated sharing of all the pieces of information needed to represent a full mass spectrometry (MS)–based proteomics experiment. …In this Correspondence, we report the first implementation of the ProteomeXchange consortium, an integrated framework for submission and dissemination of MS-based proteomics data.” Read full text.