AIRRscape: An interactive tool for exploring B-cell receptor repertoires and antibody responses

Area of Science:

• Immunoinformatics
• Computational Biology
• Virology

Background:

• Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) generates vast, complex datasets of B-cell immunoglobulin sequences.
• Analyzing these large datasets for exploratory purposes is challenging due to their scale and complexity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an interactive web application, AIRRscape, for efficient exploration and comparison of multiple AIRR-seq datasets.
• To enable discovery of B-cell receptor (BCR) and antibody features and patterns of humoral immunity.

Main Methods:

• AIRRscape is an R Shiny-based application that takes AIRR-seq data as input.
• It aggregates and sorts repertoires by germline V-gene, J-gene, and CDR3 length for high-level overview.
• Network topologies of CDR3 motifs can be generated for further in-depth analysis.

Main Results:

• AIRRscape was demonstrated using patient BCR repertoires and monoclonal antibody sequences against SARS-CoV-2, HIV-1, and DENV.
• The application revealed convergent antibody sequences among datasets for these pathogens.
• HIV-1 datasets showed limited convergence and idiosyncratic immune responses.

Conclusions:

• AIRRscape facilitates the exploration and comparison of multiple immune receptor repertoires.
• The tool aids in investigating patterns of humoral immunity and identifying convergent antibody sequences.
• AIRRscape is available as a web application and on GitHub to support open development and use.