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