Minimum Information About a Peptide Array Experiment (MIAPepAE)

Abstract

Peptide-array screening is currently a well-established high-throughput technique with growing numbers of applications. Peptide-array technology is used for protein recognition, quantification of peptide expression levels, and detection of protein-protein interactions. The use of protein/peptide arrays in medical life science studies is becoming increasingly widespread. Their increased use in diagnostic applications and protein function profiling calls for a standardised set of guidelines to be followed by future experimenters to enable reproducible, high-quality data and accurate findings.

We aim to provide preliminary guidelines describing the Minimum Information About a Peptide-Array Experiment (MIAPepAE). We propose a checklist of data and meta-data that should accompany a peptide-array experiment, and invite fellow researchers in the field to collaborate in this effort to create a sustainable and coherent set of guidelines for the benefit of the protein/peptide-array research community. Although this article focuses on spotting peptide arrays, MIAPepAE is intended to be a work-in-progress to be adopted for other peptide-array types, such as in situ synthesised peptide arrays.