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Successful AIRR Community Meeting IV

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The fourth AIRR Community meeting (#AIRRC4) took place at the University of Genoa, May 11–15, 2019, in an unusual and gorgeous location. All talks were held in a 17th century church that has been repurposed for conference settings. The overarching theme of this meeting was “Bridging the Gaps” which aimed to address technological gaps between the amounts of accumulated data and our ability to process them, and the need for more involvement of stakeholder communities (industry, clinicians, patient communities) for the dissemination and implementation of the standards developed by the AIRR Community. 

AIRR Community meetings are the premier event for research on adaptive immune-receptor repertoires. They are also the primary location where the AIRR-Community’s Working Groups and Sub-committees come together in one location to discuss how to push standardization in AIRR-sequencing (AIRR-seq) data and analysis forward.  All meeting documents, slides, and video recordings can be found here:
https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/meetings/communityiv/

Just like the biology of immune repertoires is high-dimensional, this meeting’s success was as well!  We gathered some of the numbers that best describe the success of the AIRR C IV meeting.

  • 2 Keynote speakers: Sai T. Reddy (ETH, Zürich, CH), Antonio Lanzavecchia (Instituto di Ricerca in Biomedicina, Bellinzona, CH)
  • 154 attendees from 5 continents and 22 countries
  • 18 invited speakers
  • 15 sponsors
  • This was the first time a twitter hashtag was used for an AIRR Community Meeting
  • Two pre-meeting workshops were held, teaching the basics of immunology, and of AIRR-seq data analysis 
  • AIRR-seq Tool demonstrations and Pipeline and Data Repository tutorial sessions were held

 

 

New publication on OGRDB, the Open Germline Receptor Database, is available!

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Congratulations to The Antibody Society’s Adaptive Immune Repertoire Community on the publication of their newest paper, OGRDB: a reference database of inferred immune receptor genes, in Nucleic Acid Research. The paper is open access and can be freely downloaded here.

High-throughput sequencing of the adaptive immune receptor repertoire (AIRR-seq) is providing unprecedented insights into the immune response to disease and into the development of immune disorders. The accurate interpretation of AIRR-seq data depends on the existence of comprehensive germline gene reference sets. Current sets are known to be incomplete and unrepresentative of the degree of polymorphism and diversity in human and animal populations. A key issue is the complexity of the genomic regions in which they lie, which, because of the presence of multiple repeats, insertions and deletions, have not proved tractable with short-read whole genome sequencing. Recently, tools and methods for inferring such gene sequences from AIRR-seq datasets have become available, and a community approach has been developed for the expert review and publication of such inferences. Here, we present OGRDB, the Open Germline Receptor Database (https://ogrdb.airr-community.org), a public resource for the submission, review and publication of previously unknown receptor germline sequences together with supporting evidence.

Election of new Executive Sub-committee members

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Members of the 2019/2020 Executive Sub-committee were elected at the AIRR C IV meeting in Genoa in May. Nina Luning Prak (Univ of Pennsylvania) was approved as the Chair of the AIRR Community, Lindsay Cowell (UT Southwestern, USA) was elected the Chair Elect, and Felix Breden (Simon Fraser U, Canada) became the Past Chair. Christian Busse (DKFZ, Germany), Victor Greiff (Univ of Oslo, Norway) also joined the SC.

Short bios of all members of the Executive Sub-committee are presented here: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-subcomittees/executive-sub-committee/. 

Ratification of the Communications Sub-committee

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At the AIRR C IV meeting in Genoa, the Communications Sub-committee was ratified. Its current members are Jean-Philippe Bürckert (BISC Global, Inc., USA, Co-Leader), Victor Greiff (Univ of Oslo, Norway, Co-Leader), Jamie Scott (Simon Fraser Univ, CA), Susanna Marquez (Yale, USA), and Pam Borghardt (SFU, CA).

The Sub-committee’s mission statement can be found here: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-subcomittees/communications-sub-committee/.