Worldwide genetic variation of the IGHV and TRBV immune receptor gene families in humans

Abstract

The immunoglobulin heavy variable (IGHV) and T cell beta variable (TRBV) loci are among the most complex and variable regions in the human genome. Generated through a process of gene duplication/deletion and diversification, these loci can vary extensively between individuals in copy number and contain genes that are highly similar, making their analysis technically challenging. Here, we present a comprehensive study of the functional gene segments in the IGHV and TRBV loci, quantifying their copy number and single nucleotide variation in a globally diverse sample of 109 (IGHV) and 286 (TRBV) humans from over a hundred populations. We find that the IGHV and TRBV gene families exhibit starkly different patterns of variation. In particular, with hundreds of copy number haplotypes (instances that have differences in the number of functional gene segments), the IGHV locus has undergone more frequent gene duplication/deletion compared to the TRBV locus, which has only a few copy number haplotypes. In contrast, the TRBV locus has a greater or at least equal propensity to mutate, as evidenced by greater single nucleotide variation, compared to the IGHV locus. Thus, despite common molecular and functional characteristics, the genes that comprise the IGHV and TRBV loci have evolved in strikingly different ways. As well as providing insight into the different evolutionary paths the IGHV and TRBV loci have taken, our results are also important to the adaptive immune repertoire sequencing community, where the lack of frequencies of common alleles and copy number variants is hampering existing analytical pipelines.