What are Center Initiatives?
NCEMS Center Initiatives are Center-led projects that mobilize NCEMS personnel, expertise, data, computational infrastructure, and community partnerships to address strategic research opportunities or develop shared resources of community-wide value. Unlike Working Groups, which originate from community-submitted proposals focused on a defined synthesis question or method, Center Initiatives are initiated by NCEMS leadership and are intended to generate capabilities, datasets, methods, benchmarks, or other outputs that can support multiple Working Groups and the broader scientific community.
2026 Center Initiatives
Human Proteomic Perturbation Atlas (PPA)
The Human Proteomic Perturbation Atlas (PPA) is an NCEMS initiative designed to transform thousands of publicly available human proteomics studies into a standardized, harmonized, and reusable resource for large-scale analysis. A initial and major component of the PPA is metadata harmonization with the Hybrid Agentic Metadata Literature Extraction and Technical (HAMLET) annotator, an NCEMS-developed tool that uses LLM-assisted extraction to recover detailed experimental and sample metadata from PRIDE records and their associated publications. Furthermore a new ontology which organizes treatments, experimental conditions, and sample characteristics into hierarchical broad, coarse-grained, and fine-grained categories was developed for public proteomics datasets. By converting heterogeneous and inconsistently reported study metadata into a common structured framework, the Human PPA makes it substantially more feasible to systematically reprocess, quantify, and compare large numbers of proteomics datasets using standardized workflows. The resulting atlas links harmonized experimental metadata with consistently processed quantitative proteomics data, enabling cross-study analyses of shared and context-specific proteome responses, integration of measurements reporting on protein abundance and conformational changes, and machine-learning applications that require aligned quantitative matrices and standardized experimental annotations.
Refolding the Human Proteome for AI training
Experiments, simulations, and theory are converging on a new perspective that protein misfolding is common and widespread. This project will advance this understanding by generating detailed data on folding and misfolding that will fit into a larger NCEMS initiative to pull these data into other diverse streams of information including data generated by a LiP-MS consortium and AI-generated misfolded structures. Our goal is to simulate the folding of all the globular proteins in the human proteome upon reduction in temperature from above the melting temperature to below the melting temperature (i.e., temperature quench simulations) using a coarse-grained model. The set of simulations produced will allow the community to address a new space of questions and develop new methods, including identification of folding and misfolding patterns that connect to phenotype, aging, and disease, as well as the creation of AI methods to rapidly predict protein misfolding propensities.