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The function of the immune system requires coordinated expression and action of many genes and proteins. With the emergence of high throughput technologies it has become possible to target human immunity from a systems biology point of view. To perform systems biology studies with comparable results we need not just a reference gene and protein set but also useful and descriptive reference categories for the immunity related genes. We have identified and collected the genes and proteins of the essential human immunome. The 847 genes and proteins were annotated, and characterized, and they were categorized according to their functions, protein domains and Gene Ontology terms. The reference set and the categories are freely available in the immunome database at http://bioinf.uta.fi/Immunome/.