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Updated: Jun 12, 2026

T and B Cell Receptor Immune Repertoire Analysis using Next-generation Sequencing
Published on: January 12, 2021
Profiling adaptive immunity: A quantitative framework for immune repertoire dynamics and clinical diagnostics.
Yexing Chen1,2, Haiwen Ni3, Yongjie Li1
1State Key Laboratory of Technologies for Chinese Medicine Pharmaceutical Process Control and Intelligent Manufacture, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing 210000, China.
We developed a new biophysical model to track immune repertoire evolution, enabling precise disease detection even with limited cell data. This approach decodes dynamic immune processes for better monitoring and personalized therapies.
Area of Science:
- Immunology
- Biophysics
- Computational Biology
Background:
- Immune repertoire (IR) dynamics contain disease signatures.
- Current models struggle with non-equilibrium processes like clonal selection and somatic hypermutation (SHM).
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a biophysical framework for reconstructing IR evolution.
- To enable macroscopic immune state detection from sparse data.
- To establish quantitative metrics for tracking immunological trajectories.
Main Methods:
- Mathematical reconstruction of IR evolution using energy landscape optimization.
- Mapping clonal emergence to metastable states.
- Utilizing optimal transport theory for repertoire transition costs.
- Experimental validation in murine and human cohorts.
Main Results:
- Precise unsupervised stratification of immune and disease states from low-input samples (10k cells).
- Resolution of critical fluctuations in sparse sampling regimes.
- Demonstrated ability to bridge stochastic SHM kinetics with deterministic repertoire shifts.
Conclusions:
- The developed framework provides a paradigm shift from static pattern recognition to dynamic process decoding.
- Enables sensitive immunomonitoring and personalized therapeutic design.
- Offers quantitative metrics for tracking immunological trajectories and pathological progression.
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