ALIGaToR: a tool for the automated annotation of immunoglobulin and T cell receptor genomic loci

Advances in sequencing technology have made it possible to capture complex immunogenetic loci at a scale that exceeds the capacity for manual annotation. Here we present the Annotator of Loci for ImmunoGlobulins and T cell Receptors (ALIGaToR), an automated pipeline to transfer genetic annotations from a known reference to a novel genomic assembly. We show that ALIGaToR accurately reproduces manually curated annotations and is capable of transferring labels even between distantly related species. Code and documentation for ALIGaToR, including a script reproducing all analyses in this paper, are available at https://github.com/scharch/aligator.