IGoR: A Tool For High-Throughput Immune Repertoire Analysis

Abstract

High throughput immune repertoire sequencing is promising to lead to new statistical diagnostic tools for medicine and biology. Successful implementations of these methods require a correct characterization, analysis and interpretation of these datasets. We present IGoR - a new comprehensive tool that takes B or T-cell receptors sequence reads and quantitatively characterizes the statistics of receptor generation from both cDNA and gDNA. It probabilistically annotates sequences and its modular structure can investigate models of increasing biological complexity for different organisms. For B-cells IGoR returns the hypermutation statistics, which we use to reveal co-localization of hypermutations along the sequence. We demonstrate that IGoR outperforms existing tools in accuracy and estimate the sample sizes needed for reliable repertoire characterization.