ABSTRACT
Antibody, the major effector in adaptive immunity, plays key roles in protective and pathogenic immune responses. Integrative analyses of antibody development, differentiation, and maturation promote the research in immune mechanism, vaccine design, and therapies for autoimmune disorders. The development of next generation sequencing technologies has enabled large-scale characterization of functional antibody repertoires. With the advantages of next generation sequencing, antibody and antibody repertoire analysis have been successfully used in identification of HIV-1-broadly neutralizing antibodies, design of rationale structure-based vaccine, and development of immunology. With increasing sequence length and precision, improvement of experimental protocols and bioinformatics analyses, and development of single cell sequencing technology, antibody repertoire sequencing will expedite the research in antibody-related immune response, and thus facilitates vaccine design for infectious diseases, clinical diagnosis and interference of autoimmune diseases. This review introduces the technologies, progresses, applications, and caveats of antibody repertoire sequencing.