Protein Quality Standard PQS
There is increasing awareness in the scientific community about the lack of reproducibility and reliability of results published with purified proteins. While protein production is highly regulated and controlled in the pharmaceutical industry by the authorities, there are up to date no guidelines or standards in place in the academic research to guarantee the quality of proteins included in scientific experiments. There is an urgent need to define guidelines for the scientists but also for editors and reviewers of scientific journals and funding agencies for their review processes:
Lebendiker M., Danieli T. and de Marco A. (2014)
Raynal B., Lenormand P., Baron B., Hoos S. and England P.(2014)
Berrow N., de Marco A., Lebendiker M., Garcia‑Alai. M., Knauer S.H., Lopez‑Mendez B., Matagne A., Parret A., Remans K., Uebel S., Raynal B. (2021)
de Marco A , Berrow N. , Lebendiker M , Garcia-Alai M, Knauer S. , Lopez-Mendez B. , Matagne A. , Parret A. , Remans K., Uebel S., Raynal B. (2021)
A team of experts in the field of Biophysics (Association of Resources for Biophysical Research in Europe-ARBRE-MOBIEU) and Recombinant Protein Production (Production and Purification Partnership in Europe-P4EU) have developed the following Minimal Protein Quality Standard:
Members of the Protein Quality Initiative:
Nick Berrow – Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona, Spain (P4EU)
Maria Garcia-Alai – EMBL Hamburg, Germany (ARBRE)
Stefan Knauer – Bayreuth University, Germany (ARBRE)
Mario Lebendiker – Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (P4EU)
Blanca Lopez-Mendez – Novo Nordisk Foundation, Denmark (ARBRE)
Ario de Marco – University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia (P4EU)
André Matagne – University of Liège, Belgium (ARBRE)
Annabel Parret – Charles River Laboratories, Beerse, Belgium
Bertrand Raynal – Pasteur institute, Paris, France (ARBRE)
Kim Remans – EMBL Heidelberg, Germany (P4EU)
Stephan Uebel – Max-Plank Institute for Biochemistry, Munich (ARBRE)
The full guidelines are also available as a single pdf document here (downloads document).
There is also a 30-minute webinar presentation available recorded by André Matagne from the joint PQC working group as part of the FHI-Netherlands ‘Life Science Online 2021’ webinar series. The webinar can be viewed here- André Matagne-Quality control of purified proteins to improve research data reproducibility: improving the time-efficiency and quality of your results.
The proposed guidelines are intended to lay the groundwork for the standardization and reproducibility of data. The goals of this document are to disseminate operative guidelines in our laboratories through the existing networks, to raise awareness amongst colleagues and collaborators and to encourage the whole scientific community to implement these guidelines in publications, e.g. as part of the supplementary information. The implementation of protein production and QC data will allow greater transparency to readers and enable efficient reproducibility in other laboratories.