Observed Antibody Space: A Resource for Data Mining Next-Generation Sequencing of Antibody Repertoires

Abs are immune system proteins that recognize noxious molecules for elimination. Their sequence diversity and binding versatility have made Abs the primary class of biopharmaceuticals. Recently, it has become possible to query their immense natural diversity using next-generation sequencing of Ig gene repertoires (Ig-seq). However, Ig-seq outputs are currently fragmented across repositories and tend to be presented as raw nucleotide reads, which means nontrivial effort is required to reuse the data for analysis. To address this issue, we have collected Ig-seq outputs from 55 studies, covering more than half a billion Ab sequences across diverse immune states, organisms (primarily human and mouse), and individuals. We have sorted, cleaned, annotated, translated, and numbered these sequences and make the data available via our Observed Antibody Space (OAS) resource at http://antibodymap.org The data within OAS will be regularly updated with newly released Ig-seq datasets. We believe OAS will facilitate data mining of immune repertoires for improved understanding of the immune system and development of better biotherapeutics.