Identifying clones and quantifying diversity in repertoire sequencing data.

Zurich Seminars in Bioinformatics - Siyuan Luo

• 12:15 UZH Irchel Y55-l-06/08 and ZOOM Call

The adaptive immune system is remarkable for its ability to produce immunoglobulins that can specifically bind to a wide variety of antigens. During adaptive immune responses, activated B cells expand and undergo accelerated mutation of their B cell receptor (BCR), forming a clone of diversified cells that can be related back to a common ancestor.

The identification of clonal groups from B cell sequences are a critical step in the analysis of B cell repertoires. While advances in high-throughput sequencing technology has enabled the characterization of B cell clones from B cell receptor sequencing data, the accurate identification of clonally related BCR sequences from such data remains a major challenge. Clonal structure identified using different methods may lead to inconsistent results, in particular regarding the quantification of clonal diversity in repertoire data. In this talk, I compare the results from different clone identification methods on experimental data from human Lymph node and investigate their impact on diversity analysis.