Immunoglobulin classification using the colored antibody graph

Abstract

The somatic recombination of V, D, and J gene-segments in B-cells, introduces a great deal of diversity, and divergence from reference segments. Many recent studies of antibodies focus on the population of antibody transcripts that show which V, D, and J gene-segments have been favored for a particular antigen, a repertoire. To properly describe the antibody repertoire, each antibody must be labeled by its constituting V, D, and J gene-segment, a task made difficult by somatic recombination and hypermutation events. While previous approaches to repertoire analysis were based on sequential alignments, we describe a new de Bruijn graph based algorithm to perform VDJ labeling, and benchmark its performance.