Massively scalable genetic analysis of antibody repertoires

With technical breakthroughs in the throughput and read-length of next-generation sequencing platforms, antibody repertoire sequencing is becoming an increasingly important tool for detailed characterization of the immune response. There is a need for open, scalable software for the genetic analysis of repertoire-scale antibody sequence data. To address this gap, we have developed the ab[x] package of software tools. There are three core components of the ab[x] toolkit, all of which are freely available: abcloud ( github.com/briney/abcloud ) for deployment and management of computational resources on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud; abstar ( github.com/briney/abstar ) for pre-processing, germline gene assignment and primary annotation of antibody sequence data; and abutils ( github.com/briney/abutils ), which provides utilities for interactive downstream analysis of antibody repertoire data.