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Bashour H, Smorodina E, Pariset M, Zhong J, Akbar R, Chernigovskaya M, Lê Quý K, Snapkow I, Rawat P, Krawczyk K, Sandve GK, Gutierrez-Marcos J, Gutierrez DNZ, Andersen JT, Greiff V. Biophysical cartography of the native and human-engineered antibody landscapes quantifies the plasticity of antibody developability. Commun Biol 2024; 7:922. [PMID: 39085379 PMCID: PMC11291509 DOI: 10.1038/s42003-024-06561-3] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/25/2024] [Accepted: 07/05/2024] [Indexed: 08/02/2024] Open
Abstract
Designing effective monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapeutics faces a multi-parameter optimization challenge known as "developability", which reflects an antibody's ability to progress through development stages based on its physicochemical properties. While natural antibodies may provide valuable guidance for mAb selection, we lack a comprehensive understanding of natural developability parameter (DP) plasticity (redundancy, predictability, sensitivity) and how the DP landscapes of human-engineered and natural antibodies relate to one another. These gaps hinder fundamental developability profile cartography. To chart natural and engineered DP landscapes, we computed 40 sequence- and 46 structure-based DPs of over two million native and human-engineered single-chain antibody sequences. We find lower redundancy among structure-based compared to sequence-based DPs. Sequence DP sensitivity to single amino acid substitutions varied by antibody region and DP, and structure DP values varied across the conformational ensemble of antibody structures. We show that sequence DPs are more predictable than structure-based ones across different machine-learning tasks and embeddings, indicating a constrained sequence-based design space. Human-engineered antibodies localize within the developability and sequence landscapes of natural antibodies, suggesting that human-engineered antibodies explore mere subspaces of the natural one. Our work quantifies the plasticity of antibody developability, providing a fundamental resource for multi-parameter therapeutic mAb design.
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Affiliation(s)
- Habib Bashour
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway.
- School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
| | - Eva Smorodina
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | | | - Jahn Zhong
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
- Division of Genetics, Department Biology, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany
| | - Rahmad Akbar
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Maria Chernigovskaya
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Khang Lê Quý
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Igor Snapkow
- Department of Chemical Toxicology, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway
| | - Puneet Rawat
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | | | | | | | | | - Jan Terje Andersen
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
- Department of Pharmacology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
- Precision Immunotherapy Alliance (PRIMA), University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
| | - Victor Greiff
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway.
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Chowdhury R, Taguchi AT, Kelbauskas L, Stafford P, Diehnelt C, Zhao ZG, Williamson PC, Green V, Woodbury NW. Modeling the sequence dependence of differential antibody binding in the immune response to infectious disease. PLoS Comput Biol 2023; 19:e1010773. [PMID: 37339137 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010773] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/29/2022] [Accepted: 05/15/2023] [Indexed: 06/22/2023] Open
Abstract
Past studies have shown that incubation of human serum samples on high density peptide arrays followed by measurement of total antibody bound to each peptide sequence allows detection and discrimination of humoral immune responses to a variety of infectious diseases. This is true even though these arrays consist of peptides with near-random amino acid sequences that were not designed to mimic biological antigens. This "immunosignature" approach, is based on a statistical evaluation of the binding pattern for each sample but it ignores the information contained in the amino acid sequences that the antibodies are binding to. Here, similar array-based antibody profiles are instead used to train a neural network to model the sequence dependence of molecular recognition involved in the immune response of each sample. The binding profiles used resulted from incubating serum from 5 infectious disease cohorts (Hepatitis B and C, Dengue Fever, West Nile Virus and Chagas disease) and an uninfected cohort with 122,926 peptide sequences on an array. These sequences were selected quasi-randomly to represent an even but sparse sample of the entire possible combinatorial sequence space (~1012). This very sparse sampling of combinatorial sequence space was sufficient to capture a statistically accurate representation of the humoral immune response across the entire space. Processing array data using the neural network not only captures the disease-specific sequence-binding information but aggregates binding information with respect to sequence, removing sequence-independent noise and improving the accuracy of array-based classification of disease compared with the raw binding data. Because the neural network model is trained on all samples simultaneously, a highly condensed representation of the differential information between samples resides in the output layer of the model, and the column vectors from this layer can be used to represent each sample for classification or unsupervised clustering applications.
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Affiliation(s)
- Robayet Chowdhury
- Center for Innovations in Medicine, Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, fsupArizona, United States of America
- School of Molecular Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
| | | | - Laimonas Kelbauskas
- Center for Innovations in Medicine, Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, fsupArizona, United States of America
| | - Phillip Stafford
- Center for Innovations in Medicine, Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, fsupArizona, United States of America
| | - Chris Diehnelt
- Center for Innovations in Medicine, Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, fsupArizona, United States of America
| | - Zhan-Gong Zhao
- Center for Innovations in Medicine, Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, fsupArizona, United States of America
| | | | - Valerie Green
- Creative Testing Solutions, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
| | - Neal W Woodbury
- Center for Innovations in Medicine, Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, fsupArizona, United States of America
- School of Molecular Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
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3
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Akbar R, Bashour H, Rawat P, Robert PA, Smorodina E, Cotet TS, Flem-Karlsen K, Frank R, Mehta BB, Vu MH, Zengin T, Gutierrez-Marcos J, Lund-Johansen F, Andersen JT, Greiff V. Progress and challenges for the machine learning-based design of fit-for-purpose monoclonal antibodies. MAbs 2022; 14:2008790. [PMID: 35293269 PMCID: PMC8928824 DOI: 10.1080/19420862.2021.2008790] [Citation(s) in RCA: 47] [Impact Index Per Article: 23.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/22/2021] [Revised: 11/04/2021] [Accepted: 11/17/2021] [Indexed: 12/15/2022] Open
Abstract
Although the therapeutic efficacy and commercial success of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are tremendous, the design and discovery of new candidates remain a time and cost-intensive endeavor. In this regard, progress in the generation of data describing antigen binding and developability, computational methodology, and artificial intelligence may pave the way for a new era of in silico on-demand immunotherapeutics design and discovery. Here, we argue that the main necessary machine learning (ML) components for an in silico mAb sequence generator are: understanding of the rules of mAb-antigen binding, capacity to modularly combine mAb design parameters, and algorithms for unconstrained parameter-driven in silico mAb sequence synthesis. We review the current progress toward the realization of these necessary components and discuss the challenges that must be overcome to allow the on-demand ML-based discovery and design of fit-for-purpose mAb therapeutic candidates.
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Affiliation(s)
- Rahmad Akbar
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Habib Bashour
- School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
| | - Puneet Rawat
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
- Department of Biotechnology, Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India
| | - Philippe A. Robert
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Eva Smorodina
- Faculty of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
| | | | - Karine Flem-Karlsen
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
- Institute of Clinical Medicine, Department of Pharmacology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Norway
| | - Robert Frank
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Brij Bhushan Mehta
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
| | - Mai Ha Vu
- Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway
| | - Talip Zengin
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
- Department of Bioinformatics, Mugla Sitki Kocman University, Turkey
| | | | | | - Jan Terje Andersen
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
- Institute of Clinical Medicine, Department of Pharmacology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Norway
| | - Victor Greiff
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
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Progress and challenges in mass spectrometry-based analysis of antibody repertoires. Trends Biotechnol 2021; 40:463-481. [PMID: 34535228 DOI: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2021.08.006] [Citation(s) in RCA: 19] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/23/2021] [Revised: 08/16/2021] [Accepted: 08/17/2021] [Indexed: 12/22/2022]
Abstract
Humoral immunity is divided into the cellular B cell and protein-level antibody responses. High-throughput sequencing has advanced our understanding of both these fundamental aspects of B cell immunology as well as aspects pertaining to vaccine and therapeutics biotechnology. Although the protein-level serum and mucosal antibody repertoire make major contributions to humoral protection, the sequence composition and dynamics of antibody repertoires remain underexplored. This limits insight into important immunological and biotechnological parameters such as the number of antigen-specific antibodies, which are for example, relevant for pathogen neutralization, microbiota regulation, severity of autoimmunity, and therapeutic efficacy. High-resolution mass spectrometry (MS) has allowed initial insights into the antibody repertoire. We outline current challenges in MS-based sequence analysis of antibody repertoires and propose strategies for their resolution.
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Yan L, Wang S. Shaping Polyclonal Responses via Antigen-Mediated Antibody Interference. iScience 2020; 23:101568. [PMID: 33083735 PMCID: PMC7530306 DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2020.101568] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/06/2020] [Revised: 06/29/2020] [Accepted: 09/14/2020] [Indexed: 12/05/2022] Open
Abstract
Broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) recognize conserved features of rapidly mutating pathogens and confer universal protection, but they emerge rarely in natural infection. Increasing evidence indicates that seemingly passive antibodies may interfere with natural selection of B cells. Yet, how such interference modulates polyclonal responses is unknown. Here we provide a framework for understanding the role of antibody interference—mediated by multi-epitope antigens—in shaping B cell clonal makeup and the fate of bnAb lineages. We find that, under heterogeneous interference, clones with different intrinsic fitness can collectively persist. Furthermore, antagonism among fit clones (specific for variable epitopes) promotes expansion of unfit clones (targeting conserved epitopes), at the cost of repertoire potency. This trade-off, however, can be alleviated by synergy toward the unfit. Our results provide a physical basis for antigen-mediated clonal interactions, stress system-level impacts of molecular synergy and antagonism, and offer principles to amplify naturally rare clones. Multi-epitope antigens mediate antibody interference that couples B cell lineages Trade-off exists between repertoire potency and persistence of broad lineages Antigen-mediated synergy toward intrinsically unfit clones alleviates the trade-off Amplifying rare clones by leveraging molecular interference structure
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Affiliation(s)
- Le Yan
- Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, 499 Illinois Street, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA
| | - Shenshen Wang
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
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6
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Palermo A, Nesterov-Mueller A. Serological Number for Characterization of Circulating Antibodies. Int J Mol Sci 2019; 20:ijms20030604. [PMID: 30704134 PMCID: PMC6387039 DOI: 10.3390/ijms20030604] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/13/2018] [Revised: 01/11/2019] [Accepted: 01/29/2019] [Indexed: 11/16/2022] Open
Abstract
The dissociation constant of the circulating IgG antibodies is suggested to be proportional to the partial concentrations of these antibodies in blood serum in equilibrium. This coefficient, called serological number, is a dimensionless parameter and may be equal for all antibodies in a serum. Based on the serological number, we derived the equilibrium equation of the humoral immune system which allows estimating the number of different binding motifs in a serum. This equation also allows estimating the number of binding motifs of posttranslational and conformational nature. The feasibility of measuring the serological number via peptide arrays was demonstrated. Fifteen peptides with unique binding motifs were incubated and stained with the blood serum of a healthy adult at different dilutions. From these experiments, the serological number was determined. The serological number may explain the pre-existing antibody response after vaccination.
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Affiliation(s)
- Andrea Palermo
- Institute of Microstructure Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany.
| | - Alexander Nesterov-Mueller
- Institute of Microstructure Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany.
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Miho E, Yermanos A, Weber CR, Berger CT, Reddy ST, Greiff V. Computational Strategies for Dissecting the High-Dimensional Complexity of Adaptive Immune Repertoires. Front Immunol 2018; 9:224. [PMID: 29515569 PMCID: PMC5826328 DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2018.00224] [Citation(s) in RCA: 118] [Impact Index Per Article: 19.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/22/2017] [Accepted: 01/26/2018] [Indexed: 12/21/2022] Open
Abstract
The adaptive immune system recognizes antigens via an immense array of antigen-binding antibodies and T-cell receptors, the immune repertoire. The interrogation of immune repertoires is of high relevance for understanding the adaptive immune response in disease and infection (e.g., autoimmunity, cancer, HIV). Adaptive immune receptor repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) has driven the quantitative and molecular-level profiling of immune repertoires, thereby revealing the high-dimensional complexity of the immune receptor sequence landscape. Several methods for the computational and statistical analysis of large-scale AIRR-seq data have been developed to resolve immune repertoire complexity and to understand the dynamics of adaptive immunity. Here, we review the current research on (i) diversity, (ii) clustering and network, (iii) phylogenetic, and (iv) machine learning methods applied to dissect, quantify, and compare the architecture, evolution, and specificity of immune repertoires. We summarize outstanding questions in computational immunology and propose future directions for systems immunology toward coupling AIRR-seq with the computational discovery of immunotherapeutics, vaccines, and immunodiagnostics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Enkelejda Miho
- Department for Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, Basel, Switzerland
- aiNET GmbH, ETH Zürich, Basel, Switzerland
| | - Alexander Yermanos
- Department for Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, Basel, Switzerland
| | - Cédric R. Weber
- Department for Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, Basel, Switzerland
| | - Christoph T. Berger
- Department of Biomedicine, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland
- Department of Internal Medicine, Clinical Immunology, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland
| | - Sai T. Reddy
- Department for Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, Basel, Switzerland
| | - Victor Greiff
- Department for Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, Basel, Switzerland
- Department of Immunology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
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Systems Analysis Reveals High Genetic and Antigen-Driven Predetermination of Antibody Repertoires throughout B Cell Development. Cell Rep 2017; 19:1467-1478. [DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2017.04.054] [Citation(s) in RCA: 119] [Impact Index Per Article: 17.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/07/2016] [Revised: 03/21/2017] [Accepted: 04/19/2017] [Indexed: 12/29/2022] Open
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Kuznetsov IB. Identification of non-random sequence properties in groups of signature peptides obtained in random sequence peptide microarray experiments. Biopolymers 2016; 106:318-29. [PMID: 27037995 DOI: 10.1002/bip.22845] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/12/2015] [Revised: 02/16/2016] [Accepted: 03/28/2016] [Indexed: 11/09/2022]
Abstract
Immunosignaturing is an emerging experimental technique that uses random sequence peptide microarrays to detect antibodies produced by the immune system in response to a particular disease. Two important questions regarding immunosignaturing are "Do microarray peptides that exhibit a strong affinity to a given type of antibodies share common sequence properties?" and "If so, what are those properties?" In this work, three statistical tests designed to detect non-random patterns in the amino acid makeup of a group of microarray peptides are presented. One test detects patterns of significantly biased amino acid usage, whereas the other two detect patterns of significant bias in the biochemical properties. These tests do not require a large number of peptides per group. The tests were applied to analyze 19 groups of peptides identified in immunosignaturing experiments as being specific for antibodies produced in response to various types of cancer and other diseases. The positional distribution of the biochemical properties of the amino acids in these 19 peptide groups was also studied. Remarkably, despite the random nature of the sequence libraries used to design the microarrays, a unique group-specific non-random pattern was identified in the majority of the peptide groups studied. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Biopolymers (Pept Sci) 106: 318-329, 2016.
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Affiliation(s)
- Igor B Kuznetsov
- Cancer Research Center and Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University at Albany, State University of New York, One Discovery Drive, Rensselaer, NY, 12144
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Greiff V, Bhat P, Cook SC, Menzel U, Kang W, Reddy ST. A bioinformatic framework for immune repertoire diversity profiling enables detection of immunological status. Genome Med 2015; 7:49. [PMID: 26140055 PMCID: PMC4489130 DOI: 10.1186/s13073-015-0169-8] [Citation(s) in RCA: 113] [Impact Index Per Article: 12.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/10/2022] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Lymphocyte receptor repertoires are continually shaped throughout the lifetime of an individual in response to environmental and pathogenic exposure. Thus, they may serve as a fingerprint of an individual's ongoing immunological status (e.g., healthy, infected, vaccinated), with far-reaching implications for immunodiagnostics applications. The advent of high-throughput immune repertoire sequencing now enables the interrogation of immune repertoire diversity in an unprecedented and quantitative manner. However, steadily increasing sequencing depth has revealed that immune repertoires vary greatly among individuals in their composition; correspondingly, it has been reported that there are few shared sequences indicative of immunological status ('public clones'). Disconcertingly, this means that the wealth of information gained from repertoire sequencing remains largely unused for determining the current status of immune responses, thereby hampering the implementation of immune-repertoire-based diagnostics. METHODS Here, we introduce a bioinformatics repertoire-profiling framework that possesses the advantage of capturing the diversity and distribution of entire immune repertoires, as opposed to singular public clones. The framework relies on Hill-based diversity profiles composed of a continuum of single diversity indices, which enable the quantification of the extent of immunological information contained in immune repertoires. RESULTS We coupled diversity profiles with unsupervised (hierarchical clustering) and supervised (support vector machine and feature selection) machine learning approaches in order to correlate patients' immunological statuses with their B- and T-cell repertoire data. We could predict with high accuracy (greater than or equal to 80 %) a wide range of immunological statuses such as healthy, transplantation recipient, and lymphoid cancer, suggesting as a proof of principle that diversity profiling can recover a large amount of immunodiagnostic fingerprints from immune repertoire data. Our framework is highly scalable as it easily allowed for the analysis of 1000 simulated immune repertoires; this exceeds the size of published immune repertoire datasets by one to two orders of magnitude. CONCLUSIONS Our framework offers the possibility to advance immune-repertoire-based fingerprinting, which may in the future enable a systems immunogenomics approach for vaccine profiling and the accurate and early detection of disease and infection.
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Affiliation(s)
- Victor Greiff
- ETH Zürich, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, Basel, 4058 Switzerland
| | - Pooja Bhat
- ETH Zürich, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, Basel, 4058 Switzerland
| | - Skylar C Cook
- ETH Zürich, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, Basel, 4058 Switzerland
| | - Ulrike Menzel
- ETH Zürich, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, Basel, 4058 Switzerland
| | - Wenjing Kang
- ETH Zürich, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, Basel, 4058 Switzerland
| | - Sai T Reddy
- ETH Zürich, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, Basel, 4058 Switzerland
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Greiff V, Menzel U, Haessler U, Cook SC, Friedensohn S, Khan TA, Pogson M, Hellmann I, Reddy ST. Quantitative assessment of the robustness of next-generation sequencing of antibody variable gene repertoires from immunized mice. BMC Immunol 2014; 15:40. [PMID: 25318652 PMCID: PMC4233042 DOI: 10.1186/s12865-014-0040-5] [Citation(s) in RCA: 50] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/26/2014] [Accepted: 09/15/2014] [Indexed: 02/06/2023] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Next-generation sequencing (NGS) of antibody variable regions has emerged as a powerful tool in systems immunology by providing quantitative molecular information on polyclonal humoral immune responses. Reproducible and robust information on antibody repertoires is valuable for basic and applied immunology studies: thus, it is essential to establish the reliability of antibody NGS data. RESULTS We isolated RNA from antibody-secreting cells (ASCs) from either 1 mouse or a pool of 9 immunized mice in order to simulate both normal and high diversity populations. Next, we prepared three technical replicates of antibody libraries by RT-PCR from each diversity scenario, which were sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq platform resulting in >106 250 bp paired-end reads per replicate. We then assessed the robustness of antibody repertoire data based on clonal identification defined by amino acid sequence of either full-length VDJ region or the complementarity determining region 3 (CDR3). Leveraging modeling approaches adapted from mathematical ecology, we found that in either diversity scenario both CDR3 and VDJ detection nears completeness indicating deep coverage of ASC repertoires. Additionally, we defined reliability thresholds for accurate quantification and ranking of CDR3s and VDJs. Importantly, we show that both factors-(i) replicate sequencing and (ii) sequencing depth-are crucial for robust CDR3 and VDJ detection and ranking. CONCLUSIONS In summary, we established widely applicable experimental and computational guidelines for robust antibody NGS and analysis, which will help advance systems immunology studies related to the quantitative profiling of antibody responses following infection and vaccination.
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Affiliation(s)
- Victor Greiff
- Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
| | - Ulrike Menzel
- Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
| | - Ulrike Haessler
- Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
| | - Skylar C Cook
- Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
| | - Simon Friedensohn
- Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
| | - Tarik A Khan
- Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
| | - Mark Pogson
- Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
| | - Ina Hellmann
- Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
| | - Sai T Reddy
- Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
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