Studying antibody repertoires with next-generation sequencing

Abstract

Next-generation sequencing is making it possible to study the antibody repertoire of an organism in unprecedented detail, and, by so doing, to characterize its behavior in the response to infection and in pathological conditions such as autoimmunity and cancer. The polymorphic nature of the repertoire poses unique challenges that rule out the use of many commonly used NGS methods and require tradeoffs to be made when considering experimental design. We outline the main contexts in which antibody repertoire analysis has been used, and summarize the key tools that are available. The humoral immune response to vaccination has been a particular focus of repertoire analyses, and we review the key conclusions and methods used in these studies.