The adaptive immune receptors in a big data world

Antibodies and T cell receptors are the molecular basis of immune memory, and have become the foundation for generations of clinically successful biologics. Decades of research have established diverse systems to observe, identify, discover, and optimize the adaptive immune receptors, both from natural and synthetic sources. Recent advances in high-throughput display, next-generation sequencing analysis, and machine learning data mining are accelerating our capabilities to characterize immune receptor repertoires, including based on functional properties. This commentary discusses common principles in modern immune receptor studies, with an eye toward the near-term horizon in large functional dataset collection and analysis.