Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 15, 2026
Immunoglobulin Gene Sequence Analysis In Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia: From Patient Material To Sequence Interpretation
Published on: November 26, 2018
iHMMune-align: hidden Markov model-based alignment and identification of germline genes in rearranged immunoglobulin
Bruno A Gaëta1, Harald R Malming, Katherine J L Jackson
1School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. bgaeta@cse.unsw.edu.au
Motivation:
Immunoglobulin heavy chain (IGH) genes in mature B lymphocytes are the result of recombination of IGHV, IGHD and IGHJ germline genes, followed by somatic mutation. The correct identification of the germline genes that make up a variable VH domain is essential to our understanding of the process of antibody diversity generation as well as to clinical investigations of some leukaemias and lymphomas.
Results:
We have developed iHMMune-align, an alignment program that uses a hidden Markov model (HMM) to model the processes involved in human IGH gene rearrangement and maturation. The performance of iHMMune-align was compared to that of other immunoglobulin gene alignment utilities using both clonally related and randomly selected IGH sequences. This evaluation suggests that iHMMune-align provides a more accurate identification of component germline genes than other currently available IGH gene characterization programs.
Availability:
iHMMune-align cross-platform Java executable and web interface are freely available to academic users and can be accessed at http://www.emi.unsw.edu.au/~ihmmune/.
