A curated collection of human vaccination response signatures

Recent advances in high-throughput experiments and systems biology approaches have resulted in hundreds of publications identifying immune signatures. Unfortunately, these are often described within text, figures, or tables in a format not amenable to computational processing, thus severely hampering our ability to fully exploit this information. Here we present a data model to represent immune signatures, along with the Human Immunology Project Consortium (HIPC) Dashboard (), a web-enabled application to facilitate signature access and querying. The data model captures the biological response components (e.g., genes, proteins, cell types or metabolites) and metadata describing the context under which the signature was identified using standardized terms from established resources (e.g., HGNC, Protein Ontology, Cell Ontology). We have manually curated a collection of >600 immune signatures from >60 published studies profiling human vaccination responses for the current release. The system will aid in building a broader understanding of the human immune response to stimuli by enabling researchers to easily access and interrogate published immune signatures.

Automated summary

Advancements in high-throughput experiments and systems biology approaches have led to the identification of immune signatures. However, these signatures are often presented in a format that is not suitable for computational processing, hindering our ability to fully utilize this information. In this study, a data model and a web-enabled application were developed to facilitate the access and querying of immune signatures.