scholarly journals AbDiver - A tool to explore the natural antibody landscape to aid therapeutic design

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakub Mlokosiewicz ◽  
Piotr Deszynski ◽  
Wiktoria Wilman ◽  
Igor Jaszczyszyn ◽  
Rajkumar Ganesan ◽  
...  

Motivation: Rational design of therapeutic antibodies can be improved by harnessing the natural sequence diversity of these molecules. Our understanding of the diversity of antibodies has recently been greatly facilitated through the deposition of hundreds of millions of human antibody sequences in next-generation sequencing (NGS) repositories. Contrasting a query therapeutic antibody sequence to naturally observed diversity in similar antibody sequences from NGS can provide a mutational road-map for antibody engineers designing biotherapeutics. Because of the sheer scale of the antibody NGS datasets, performing queries across them is computationally challenging. Results: To facilitate harnessing antibody NGS data, we developed AbDiver (http://naturalantibody.com/abdiver), a free portal allowing users to compare their query sequences to those observed in the natural repertoires. AbDiver offers three antibody-specific use-cases: 1) compare a query antibody to positional variability statistics precomputed from multiple independent studies 2) retrieve close full variable sequence matches to a query antibody and 3) retrieve CDR3 or clonotype matches to a query antibody. We applied our system to a set of 742 therapeutic antibodies, demonstrating that for each use-case our system can retrieve relevant results for most sequences. AbDiver facilitates the navigation of vast antibody mutation space for the purpose of rational therapeutic antibody de-sign and engineering. Availability: AbDiver is freely accessible at http://naturalantibody.com/abdiver

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Pechlivanis ◽  
Maria Tsagiopoulou ◽  
Maria Maniou ◽  
Anastasis Togkousidis ◽  
Evangelia Mouchtaropoulou ◽  
...  

Abstract The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic represents an unprecedented global crisis necessitating novel approaches for, amongst others, early detection of emerging variants relating to the evolution and spread of the virus. Recently, the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater has emerged as a useful tool to monitor the prevalence of the virus in the community. Here, we propose a novel methodology, called lineagespot, for the monitoring of variants and the detection of SARS-CoV-2 lineages in wastewater samples using next-generation sequencing (NGS). Our proposed method was tested and evaluated using NGS data produced by the sequencing of fourteen wastewater samples from the municipality of Thessaloniki, Greece, covering a six month period. The results showed a clear identification of trends in the presence of SARS-CoV-2 mutations in wastewater data. Lineagespot was able to record the evolution and rapid domination of the B.1.1.7 lineage in the community, and allowed for a robust inference between the variants evident through our approach and the variants observed in patients from the same area time periods. Lineagespot is an open-source tool, implemented in R, and is freely available on GitHub.


Cells ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 416
Author(s):  
Lorena Landuzzi ◽  
Maria Cristina Manara ◽  
Pier-Luigi Lollini ◽  
Katia Scotlandi

Osteosarcoma (OS) is a rare malignant primary tumor of mesenchymal origin affecting bone. It is characterized by a complex genotype, mainly due to the high frequency of chromothripsis, which leads to multiple somatic copy number alterations and structural rearrangements. Any effort to design genome-driven therapies must therefore consider such high inter- and intra-tumor heterogeneity. Therefore, many laboratories and international networks are developing and sharing OS patient-derived xenografts (OS PDX) to broaden the availability of models that reproduce OS complex clinical heterogeneity. OS PDXs, and new cell lines derived from PDXs, faithfully preserve tumor heterogeneity, genetic, and epigenetic features and are thus valuable tools for predicting drug responses. Here, we review recent achievements concerning OS PDXs, summarizing the methods used to obtain ectopic and orthotopic xenografts and to fully characterize these models. The availability of OS PDXs across the many international PDX platforms and their possible use in PDX clinical trials are also described. We recommend the coupling of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis with functional studies in OS PDXs, as well as the setup of OS PDX clinical trials and co-clinical trials, to enhance the predictive power of experimental evidence and to accelerate the clinical translation of effective genome-guided therapies for this aggressive disease.


Molecules ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sima Taheri ◽  
Thohirah Lee Abdullah ◽  
Mohd Yusop ◽  
Mohamed Hanafi ◽  
Mahbod Sahebi ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shazia Mahamdallie ◽  
Elise Ruark ◽  
Shawn Yost ◽  
Emma Ramsay ◽  
Imran Uddin ◽  
...  

Detection of deletions and duplications of whole exons (exon CNVs) is a key requirement of genetic testing. Accurate detection of this variant type has proved very challenging in targeted next-generation sequencing (NGS) data, particularly if only a single exon is involved. Many different NGS exon CNV calling methods have been developed over the last five years. Such methods are usually evaluated using simulated and/or in-house data due to a lack of publicly-available datasets with orthogonally generated results. This hinders tool comparisons, transparency and reproducibility. To provide a community resource for assessment of exon CNV calling methods in targeted NGS data, we here present the ICR96 exon CNV validation series. The dataset includes high-quality sequencing data from a targeted NGS assay (the TruSight Cancer Panel) together with Multiplex Ligation-dependent Probe Amplification (MLPA) results for 96 independent samples. 66 samples contain at least one validated exon CNV and 30 samples have validated negative results for exon CNVs in 26 genes. The dataset includes 46 exon CNVs in BRCA1, BRCA2, TP53, MLH1, MSH2, MSH6, PMS2, EPCAM or PTEN, giving excellent representation of the cancer predisposition genes most frequently tested in clinical practice. Moreover, the validated exon CNVs include 25 single exon CNVs, the most difficult type of exon CNV to detect. The FASTQ files for the ICR96 exon CNV validation series can be accessed through the European-Genome phenome Archive (EGA) under the accession number EGAS00001002428.


F1000Research ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael T. Wolfinger ◽  
Jörg Fallmann ◽  
Florian Eggenhofer ◽  
Fabian Amman

Recent achievements in next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies lead to a high demand for reuseable software components to easily compile customized analysis workflows for big genomics data. We present ViennaNGS, an integrated collection of Perl modules focused on building efficient pipelines for NGS data processing. It comes with functionality for extracting and converting features from common NGS file formats, computation and evaluation of read mapping statistics, as well as normalization of RNA abundance. Moreover, ViennaNGS provides software components for identification and characterization of splice junctions from RNA-seq data, parsing and condensing sequence motif data, automated construction of Assembly and Track Hubs for the UCSC genome browser, as well as wrapper routines for a set of commonly used NGS command line tools.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anja Berger ◽  
Alexandra Dangel ◽  
Tilmann Schober ◽  
Birgit Schmidbauer ◽  
Regina Konrad ◽  
...  

In September 2018, a child who had returned from Somalia to Germany presented with cutaneous diphtheria by toxigenic Corynebacterium diphtheriae biovar mitis. The child’s sibling had superinfected insect bites harbouring also toxigenic C. diphtheriae. Next generation sequencing (NGS) revealed the same strain in both patients suggesting very recent human-to-human transmission. Epidemiological and NGS data suggest that the two cutaneous diphtheria cases constitute the first outbreak by toxigenic C. diphtheriae in Germany since the 1980s.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 2036
Author(s):  
Jaroslaw Bilinski ◽  
Mikolaj Dziurzynski ◽  
Pawel Grzesiowski ◽  
Edyta Podsiadly ◽  
Anna Stelmaszczyk-Emmel ◽  
...  

Methods of stool assessment are mostly focused on next-generation sequencing (NGS) or classical culturing, but only rarely both. We conducted a series of experiments using a multi-method approach to trace the stability of gut microbiota in various donors over time, to find the best method for the proper selection of fecal donors and to find “super-donor” indicators. Ten consecutive stools donated by each of three donors were used for the experiments (30 stools in total). The experiments assessed bacterial viability measured by flow cytometry, stool culturing on different media and in various conditions, and NGS (90 samples in total). There were no statistically significant differences between live and dead cell numbers; however, we found a group of cells classified as not-dead-not-alive, which may be possibly important in selection of “good” donors. Donor C, being a regular stool donor, was characterized by the largest number of cultivable species (64). Cultivable core microbiota (shared by all donors) was composed of only 16 species. ANCOM analysis of NGS data highlighted particular genera to be more abundant in one donor vs. the others. There was a correlation between the not-dead-not-alive group found in flow cytometry and Anaeroplasma found by NGS, and we could distinguish a regular stool donor from the others. In this work, we showed that combining various methods of microbiota assessment gives more information than each method separately.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document