2022/12/22 by Natanael Spisak, Spisak, Natanael, Thomas Dupic +6 · 3 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Immunology and Microbiology · Medicine · #FOS: Biological sciences #Genomics (q-bio.GN) #Glycosylation and Glycoproteins Research #Monoclonal and Polyclonal Antibodies Research #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #T-cell and B-cell Immunology
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.11997
openalex publication_date 2022/12/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
B-cell repertoires are characterized by a diverse set of receptors of distinct specificities generated through two processes of somatic diversification: V(D)J recombination and somatic hypermutations. B cell clonal families stem from the same V(D)J recombination event, but differ in their hypermutations. Clonal families identification is key to understanding B-cell repertoire function, evolution and dynamics. We present HILARy (High-precision Inference of Lineages in Antibody Repertoires), an efficient, fast and precise method to identify clonal families from single- or paired-chain repertoire sequencing datasets. HILARy combines probabilistic models that capture the receptor generation and selection statistics with adapted clustering methods to achieve consistently high inference accuracy. It automatically leverages the phylogenetic signal of shared mutations in difficult repertoire subsets. Exploiting the high sensitivity of the method, we find the statistics of evolutionary properties such as the site frequency spectrum and dN/dS ratio do not depend on the junction length. We also identify a broad range of selection pressures spanning two orders of magnitude.