The Antibody Registry: ten years of registering antibodies

Abstract

Antibodies are ubiquitous key biological research resources yet are tricky to use as they are prone to performance issues and represent a major source of variability across studies. Understanding what antibody was used in a published study is therefore necessary to repeat and/or interpret a given study. However, antibody reagents are still frequently not cited with sufficient detail to determine which antibody was used in experiments. The Antibody Registry is a public, open database that enables citation of antibodies by providing a persistent record for any antibody-based reagent used in a publication. The registry is the authority for antibody Research Resource Identifiers, or RRIDs, which are requested or required by hundreds of journals seeking to improve the citation of these key resources. The registry is the most comprehensive listing of persistently identified antibody reagents used in the scientific literature. Data contributors span individual authors who use antibodies to antibody companies, which provide their entire catalogs including discontinued items. Unlike many commercial antibody listing sites which tend to remove reagents no longer sold, registry records persist, providing an interface between a fast-moving commercial marketplace and the static scientific literature. The Antibody Registry (RRID:SCR_006397) https://antibodyregistry.org.

Figure 1.

Antibody Registry 2022 redesign of the user interface. (A) shows the home page which allows users to search for antibodies (we suggest search for catalog numbers as that is usually the most efficient). Users can now copy the proper citation with a single click available when hovering over the proper citation column. Users can also get more information about the RRID by clicking on the left most column, which is linked to stable webpages shown in B. (B) stable webpage for a particular RRID record. These pages display multiple records and the history of this record. (C) shows the new login feature through ORCID. Existing registry users are able to use their current accounts.

Figure 2.

Process of entering a new antibody record in the Antibody Registry. (A) shows the submission window. The authors must enter the catalog number and direct URL to the product to obtain an RRID. The URL can be opened in the entry window for easy verification that this is the appropriate record. (B) a message to the author when submitting includes either a new RRID or the displayed duplicate message. In both cases, authors are provided an RRID (temporary in the case of a new entry or corrected in the case of a duplicate entry). We updated the duplicate message to also display in Chinese because we noticed that Chinese authors were submitting the same antibody multiple times so we guessed that they were not understanding the message. (C) Curator view of 19 records for the same antibody entered by different users over 7 years. One record, highlighted in blue, is curated and available through the public Antibody Registry, while others are only available to curators and submitters.

Figure 3.

Percentage of the proteome that is covered by antibodies. This cumulative plot shows that about 10% of the total proteins have less than 15 antibodies, about 10% of proteins have more than 100 antibodies, but roughly 80% of known human proteins have 15 to about 100 antibody reagents available for researchers. While we do not know if there are high quality antibodies validated for each target, we do at least know that most of the proteome is accessible by these key reagents. For a listing of protein names and the associated counts please see the supplementary data file.

Figure 4.

Antibody Registry access statistics. (A) shows an example paper (17) that contains RRIDs linked to the Antibody Registry for all RRIDs. (B) Counts of antibody RRIDs as of August 8, 2022 captured by curators used in papers such as that shown in (A), per year. (C) Monthly access statistics provided by Google analytics for the Antibody Registry from 1 February 2014 until 8 August 2022.