ABSTRACT
Recent studies have revealed that immune repertoires contain a substantial fraction of public clones, which may be defined as Ab or TCR clonal sequences shared across individuals. It has remained unclear whether public clones possess predictable sequence features that differentiate them from private clones, which are believed to be generated largely stochastically. This knowledge gap represents a lack of insight into the shaping of immune repertoire diversity. Leveraging a machine learning approach capable of capturing the high-dimensional compositional information of each clonal sequence (defined by CDR3), we detected predictive public clone and private clone-specific immunogenomic differences concentrated in CDR3's N1-D-N2 region, which allowed the prediction of public and private status with 80% accuracy in humans and mice. Our results unexpectedly demonstrate that public, as well as private, clones possess predictable high-dimensional immunogenomic features. Our support vector machine model could be trained effectively on large published datasets (3 million clonal sequences) and was sufficiently robust for public clone prediction across individuals and studies prepared with different library preparation and high-throughput sequencing protocols. In summary, we have uncovered the existence of high-dimensional immunogenomic rules that shape immune repertoire diversity in a predictable fashion. Our approach may pave the way for the construction of a comprehensive atlas of public mouse and human immune repertoires with potential applications in rational vaccine design and immunotherapeutics.
Subject(s)
B-Lymphocytes/physiology , Complementarity Determining Regions/genetics , Immunotherapy/methods , Receptors, Antigen, B-Cell/genetics , Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell/genetics , T-Lymphocytes/physiology , Vaccines/immunology , Animals , Antibody Diversity , Clonal Selection, Antigen-Mediated , Clone Cells , Datasets as Topic , High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing , Humans , Mice , Mice, Inbred BALB C , Mice, Inbred C57BLABSTRACT
KeBABS provides a powerful, flexible and easy to use framework for KE: rnel- B: ased A: nalysis of B: iological S: equences in R. It includes efficient implementations of the most important sequence kernels, also including variants that allow for taking sequence annotations and positional information into account. KeBABS seamlessly integrates three common support vector machine (SVM) implementations with a unified interface. It allows for hyperparameter selection by cross validation, nested cross validation and also features grouped cross validation. The biological interpretation of SVM models is supported by (1) the computation of weights of sequence patterns and (2) prediction profiles that highlight the contributions of individual sequence positions or sections.
