nf-core/airrflow: An adaptive immune receptor repertoire analysis workflow employing the Immcantation framework

Abstract

Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) is a valuable experimental tool to study the immune state in health and following immune challenges such as infectious diseases, (auto)immune diseases, and cancer. Several tools have been developed to reconstruct B cell and T cell receptor sequences from AIRR-seq data and infer B and T cell clonal relationships. However, currently available tools offer limited parallelization across samples, scalability or portability to high-performance computing infrastructures. To address this need, we developed nf-core/airrflow, an end-to-end bulk and single-cell AIRR-seq processing workflow which integrates the Immcantation Framework following BCR and TCR sequencing data analysis best practices. The Immcantation Framework is a comprehensive toolset, which allows the processing of bulk and single-cell AIRR-seq data from raw read processing to clonal inference. nf-core/airrflow is written in Nextflow and is part of the nf-core project, which collects community contributed and curated Nextflow workflows for a wide variety of analysis tasks. We assessed the performance of nf-core/airrflow on simulated sequencing data with sequencing errors and show example results with real datasets. To demonstrate the applicability of nf-core/airrflow to the high-throughput processing of large AIRR-seq datasets, we validated and extended previously reported findings of convergent antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 by analyzing 97 COVID-19 infected individuals and 99 healthy controls, including a mixture of bulk and single-cell sequencing datasets. Using this dataset, we extended the convergence findings to 20 additional subjects, highlighting the applicability of nf-core/airrflow to validate findings in small in-house cohorts with reanalysis of large publicly available AIRR datasets.