IMMUNITY

Next-generation immune profiling

The advent of next-generation, high-throughput sequencing technology has enabled the sequencing of antibody repertoires at an unprecedented level of detail.  Whereas analysis of the antibody repertoire has been historically confounded by its extraordinary size and diversity, the potential now exists for repertoire profiling to provide new insights into the basis of a wide variety of immune diseases, as well as for the creation of new modalities for personalized therapy and disease prevention.

Ongoing immune profiling projects in the CSSB include:

  • Next-Gen sequencing of normal human antibody repertoires in peripheral blood B cells
  • Development of human antibody repertoires in engrafted “humanized” mice
  • Systems vaccinology of antibody responses to seasonal influenza and tetanus toxoid vaccination
  • Development of bioinformatics for high-throughput analysis of immune repertoires

To date, we have published several reports utilizing a subset of our bioinformatics tools to survey B-cell repertoires isolated from normal mice (Nature Biotechnology, 2010; Frontiers in Immunology, 2012), healthy human donors (Nature Biotechnology, 2013), and humanized mice (PLoS ONE, 2012).

The outcomes of these efforts should help to define and extend our understanding of the complex biology of the immune system and immunologic diseases, facilitate diagnosis, and also produce computational tools useful to a large component of the basic and clinical research community.