The Antibiome Center: Founded in 2013 by Professor Jim Wells and Director Michael Hornsby, this center is devoted to identification and generation of recombinant antibodies at a proteome-wide scale. We have industrialized the production of high quality antibodies using robot-assisted phage antibody selection and characterization (Fig. 1; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9RV80UmQP8). The Center was launched with a U54 Common Fund grant from NIH in collaboration groups at University of Chicago lead by Professor Tony Kossikoff and University of Toronto lead by Professor Dev Sidhu. All three centers comprise the Recombinant Antibody Network (http://recombinant-antibodies.org/). The RAN group successfully generated renewable antibodies to over 500 proteins involved in chromatin remodeling including transcription factors and chromatin remodeling proteins (Hornsby et al 2015). Many of the plasmids encoding these antibodies are publically available through DNASU or the RAN website.

The Antibiome Center is now focused on proteome-wide selection of antibodies to the entire membrane proteome both with the RAN (enabled through funding from Celgene) and with the Antibody Research Technology Center at UCSF with Professors James Marks and Charles Craik (funded through an NCI P41 grant). Our vision that systematic coverage of the cell surfaceome with recombinant antibodies will enable us to better understand how cell surfaces change in health and disease. These recombinant antibodies will allow discovery of new biomarkers as well as therapeutic targets and tools to modulate them.