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Nominations are invited from active HUPO members with professional experience in the educational, research, or commercial activities related to the purposes of HUPO, to serve 2-year terms as treasurer or member-at-large (2 positions) on the HUPO Executive Committee, commencing January 2021. Nominations will be elected by Council vote.

For more information and to apply, view, complete and submit the HUPO Executive Committee Nomination Form with a photo of yourself, by September 15 , 2020.

Online voting for HUPO 2020 Council Elections will begin on Monday, September 21st and an email containing a secure election ID code along with voting instructions will be sent to all active HUPO members. If you are a HUPO member and do not receive this email check your Junk/Spam folder. Election closes on Sunday, October 18, 2019 at 23:59 Pacific Standard time (PST); be sure to submit your anonymous vote before then!

Working on human protein data but never had time to explore neXtProt? Want to better understand its data model or integrate its tools in your data workflow? This online course (lecture and/or practicals) is for you! Please register asap, places are limited! Visit the SIB page for more details: https://www.sib.swiss/training/course/2020-09-nextprot

With the development of a “Virtual HUPO 2020” congress, this year the HUPO awards will be presented online via webinar during the virtual congress . 

The following HUPO awards remain open for nominations until July 31, 2020:

Distinguished Achievement in Proteomic Sciences Award ($3000, sponsored by Journal of Proteome Research – ACS Publications) recognizes a scientist for distinguished scientific achievements in the field of proteomic science. 

Discovery in Proteomic Sciences Award ($3000, sponsored by Journal of Proteomics – Elsevier BV) recognizes a scientist for single discovery in the field of proteomics. 

Clinical and Translational Proteomics Award ($3000, sponsored by Clinical Proteomics – BioMedCentral) recognizes a scientist for distinguished scientific achievements in the field of clinical and translational proteomics. 

Nomination Deadline: July 31, 2020

Click here to review the nomination requirements and submission details.

Thank you for your nominations! 

After close monitoring of the global risk assessment by the World Health Organization of the COVID-19 pandemic, on behalf of the HUPO Executive Committee, Swedish Proteomics Society, Swedish Pharmaceutical Society and the HUPO 2020 Local Organizing Committee, we wish to share with you today that the HUPO 2020 World Congress (HUPO 2020), originally scheduled on October 18-22, 2020 in Stockholm, Sweden will be postponed to October 24-28, 2021. The location (Waterfront Congress Centre in Stockholm, Sweden) will remain the same.

The postponement was based on multiple factors, including but not limited to, the current travel restrictions put in place and, importantly, the toll currently being placed on our health care community. These restrictions significantly affect the ability of delegates, speakers, presenters, sponsors and exhibitors to participate fully in HUPO 2020. This decision also underlines our commitment to containing the virus and preventing further sickness and loss of life, as per WHO recommendations.

Although the postponement comes as a great disappointment, we are ready to embrace the challenge! We want to ensure you stay connected with what's happening in proteomics, which is why our team is excited to announce the first-ever international HUPO virtual experience! We will be providing a series of virtual meetings in fall of 2020 which amongst the sessions planned will include one to highlight the role of proteomics in tackling many key aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Due to the rapidly evolving nature of the pandemic, we invite all delegates and industry partners to read our FAQs and monitor your emails, as well as the congress website, for specific information on the new Congress timeline.

The Local Organizing Committee with the support of the Swedish Proteomics Society, Swedish Pharmaceutical Society and HUPO are committed to bringing you a HUPO World Congress as never before and look forward to seeing you in 2021!

In the meantime, please stay safe and healthy.

Stephen Pennington
HUPO President

Don't miss the chance to submit your candidacy to become a HUPO Council member for a three-year term (2021-2023). Complete the 2020 Elections Nomination Form (available here) and submit it to office@hupo.org before 30 April 2020.

The current council list can be found here:2020 HUPO Council Election

The deadline to receive nominations is 30 April 2020.

Henning Hermjakob, European Bioinformatics Institute, UK

Biomolecular pathways are a key tool to put proteomics results into context, and pathway databases are often the first port of call to make sense of long lists of identifications and quantitations. Reactome (https://reactome.org) [1] is an open source, open data knowledge base of curated human pathways. While Reactome employs full time curators, we depend critically on voluntary domain experts who provide their time and knowledge to ensure quality and coverage of the pathways annotated in the database. Similar to manuscript reviewers, these essential community contributors are hard to attract, and the Reactome team would like to reach out to the HUPO community to contribute to the extension and validation of Reactome content. Recently, we have added features that allow to search for contributors by name, and for them to claim their contributions to their ORCID (https://orcid.org/) profile with a few clicks [2], contributing to efforts to provide credit for open data.

So, if you have a favorite pathway, please check if it’s already perfect in Reactome, and if not, click on https://reactome.org/community/collaboration to provide your expertise, and to support your future pathway analysis!

When you give presentations please disseminate this important message- using the slides included here.

Example of a Reactome pathway overview diagram (free to download as vector graphic).

1: Jassal B, et al. The reactome pathway knowledgebase. Nucleic Acids Res. 2020 Jan 8;48(D1):D498-D503. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkz1031. PubMed PMID: 31691815.

2: Viteri G, et al. Reactome and ORCID-fine-grained credit attribution for community curation. Database (Oxford). 2019 Jan 1;2019. pii: baz123. Doi: 10.1093/database/baz123. PubMed PMID: 31802127.

Sanjeeva Srivastava, IIT Bombay, India

On February 5 – 7, 2019 the Continuing Education Programmes (CEP) at IIT Bombay hosted a Proteomics course titled “Proteomics: Sample Preparation, Mass Spectrometry and Data Analysis”. Participants prepared their own samples for protein identification, label-free quantification and iTRAQ-based quantitative proteomics analysis. While the participants learnt new techniques, the proteomics team from IIT did meta data analysis, results for coverage and reproducibility in assays. Click here to view the event photos. 

A Message from hPOP - Assay Invite

The hPOP project to profile people from around the world has been highly successful in the sample collection. We have collected samples from each of the three regions: Boston (Pilot n = 31 individuals), Taipei (N = 106), Dublin (n = 115), Orlando (n = 84). Plus to increase North American numbers we have collected samples from the Bay area (n = 40).

We are now ready for the analyses. On a google spread sheet we list possible assays. We are looking for volunteers to help carry them out. Feel free to suggest additional assays. Our goal is to get these assays done in the next 2-3 months and then analyze the data and present the results at the next HUPO meeting in Australia. The analyses will take some time because there is lots to do we need to do age correction, BMI, etc. We suggest discussing results/analyses on consortium calls starting in January. Note the Snyder lab signed up for many assays but if there are volunteers to take over some of them that would be fine (we want to make sure that a basic set of analyses is done).

We are also building an interactive database to get the data back to participants.

1. Please sign up for assays on the google spread sheet here.

2. Send any and all comments to us at sahadi@stanford.edu.

Let us know if you would like to participate in any of the consortium calls. This is a very unique project and open access resource-we hope to get a high profile paper out of this.

Norman Anderson passed away November 22, 2018 after a short illness, five months before his 100th birthday. He is known both for visionary Big Science projects (the Molecular Anatomy Program, the Human Protein Index, and Rapid Response to Viral Pandemics) and for a series of widely-used bioanalytical inventions (the zonal ultracentrifuge, the centrifugal fast analyzer, large scale 2-D electrophoresis, and virus purification, which was his creative focus late in life). His career spanned military service in World War II (US Navy), advanced degrees (Duke University), National Laboratories (Oak Ridge and Argonne), commercial biotechnology (Large Scale Biology Corp), and non-profit foundations (Viral Defense Foundation), producing more than 250 publications and 35 patents.

Norman Anderson was raised in a religious family of St. Paul MN, in which his father, brother and both sisters pursued careers in the Norwegian Lutheran church. Joining the Navy during World War II, work in underwater photography, eye movement tracking during instrument flight, and on submarines and blimps, expanded his horizons and allowed him to develop novel equipment and ideas. During the war, he met and rapidly married Mary Lloyd Glidewell, daughter of a prominent lawyer in Reidsville, NC, who provided the genial southern atmosphere that sustained him for their 77 years together. Mary Lloyd encouraged him to follow his scientific interests as a graduate student at Duke, instead of accompanying his Navy friends to Hollywood as a photographer, and after a PhD in cell physiology, Norman accepted a fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he remained for 20 years. At Oak Ridge, he developed a plan for the complete fractionation of human cells, and to this end developed the zonal ultracentrifuge (including systems for large scale influenza virus purification still used to produce safe vaccines today), the centrifugal fast analyzer (subsequently commercialized by multiple companies for clinical laboratory testing), and high-pressure liquid chromatography systems.

After a brief interlude at the Medical University of South Carolina, Dr. Anderson moved to Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, where, together with his son Leigh Anderson, he pioneered the use of large-scale 2-D electrophoresis to catalog the human proteins. The potential of this technology led them to start Large Scale Biology Corp. (LSBC), leading to the complete automation of 2-D electrophoresis and the creation of protein databases, as well as development of a large-scale centrifugal oligonucleotide synthesizer (PCOS). After merging with a California-based protein expression company, LSBC completed a highly successfully IPO in 2000.

Over the past 15 years Dr. Anderson focused his attention on the problem of detecting newly emerging viruses and rapidly creating vaccines to prevent their spread as epidemics. His vision of a Manhattan Project-style approach to this existential challenge to civilization highlighted the differences between modern mechanisms of grant-based scientific research and the scale, commitment and speed possible in the context of a World War.

Dr. Anderson received a number of awards including the Distinguished Clinical Chemist Award from the International Federation for Clinical Chemistry (1990); the 1983 Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award (1983) for work in high resolution two-dimensional electrophoresis (shared with N. Leigh Anderson); an Docteur Honoris Causa, University of Nancy, France; the John Scott Medal and Award for the invention of the zonal ultracentrifuge (1972); the Atomic Energy Commission Citation and Gold Medal for the invention and development of the K-II vaccine-purification ultracentrifuge (1972); the Preis für Biochemische Analytik, awarded by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Klinische Chemie for the invention of the centrifugal fast analyzer (1972); and a U.S. Navy Special Citation for outstanding work as a combat photographic officer in the submarine service in the Pacific during WWII (1946).

Norman Anderson is survived by his son (Leigh Anderson), with whom he collaborated in proteomics research for more than 40 years, Leigh’s wife Constance Seniff, and his daughter (Beth Anderson, successively a ballerina, rock musician, scientific instrument builder and science animator), and her husband Douglas Huff. Mary Lloyd died six months before him, which was a great blow. Norman is fondly remembered by a host of co-workers, students and neighbors in whom his perpetual enthusiasm excited a profound interest in science.