The Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR) Community of The Antibody Society is a research-driven group that is organizing and coordinating stakeholders in the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies to study antibody/B-cell and T-cell receptor repertoires. Recent advances in sequencing technology have made it possible to sample the immune repertoire in exquisite detail. AIRR sequencing has enormous promise for understanding the dynamics of the immune repertoire in vaccinology, infectious disease, autoimmunity, and cancer biology, but also poses substantial challenges. The AIRR Community was established to meet these challenges.
The AIRR Community and its associated meetings and workshops are designed to develop standards and recommendations for: 1) obtaining, analyzing, curating and comparing/sharing NGS AIRR datasets; 2) using and validating tools for analyzing AIRR data; 3) relating AIRR NGS datasets to other “big data” sets, such as microarray, flow cytometric, and MiSeq gene-expression data; and 4) legal and ethical issues involving the use and sharing of AIRR data sets derived from human sources. The proceedings of the workshops, including the recommendations and action plans, will be published to benefit the larger scientific community.
AIRR Community Meetings
The Fourth AIRR Community Meeting took place May 11-15, 2019 at the University of Genoa Scuola Politecnica in Genoa, Italy.
The Third AIRR Community Meeting was held December 3-6, 2017 at NIH’s Fishers Lane facility. Go to the Third AIRR Community Meeting page for the full meeting agenda, and a link to the recorded videos of the sessions.
The Second AIRR Community Meeting was held June 27-30, 2016 at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s Fishers Lane facility. Go to the Second AIRR Community Meeting page for the full meeting agenda, and a link to videos of the six sessions.
AIRR Community Publications
Since 2017 the AIRR Community Initiative has published four papers:
- Breden et al. Reproducibility and Reuse of Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire Data (Frontiers in Immunology, 2017) introduced the goals of the AIRR Community Initiative and urged researchers to join our efforts.
- Rubelt et al. Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire Community recommendations for sharing immune-repertoire sequencing data (Nature Immunology, 2017, 18(12):1274-1278) reports the Community’s recommendations for a minimal set of metadata that should be used to describe an AIRR-seq data set when published or when deposited in a AIRR-compliant repository.
- Vander Heiden et al. AIRR Community Standardized Representations for Annotated Immune Repertoires (Frontiers in Immunology, 2018) describes the standardized data representations for storing and sharing annotated antibody and T cell receptor data.
- Ohlin et al. Inferred Allelic Variants of Immunoglobulin Receptor Genes: A System for Their Evaluation, Documentation, and Naming (Frontiers in Immunology, 2019) summarizes recommendations developed by the IARC—focusing, to begin with, on human IGHV genes—with the goal of facilitating the acceptance of inferred allelic variants of germline IGHV genes.
Who is the AIRR Community?
The original AIRR Community meetings were the brainchild of Jamie Scott, Tom Kepler, and Felix Breden. From its conception in 2014, the AIRR Community grew and flourished, then joined The Antibody Society in 2018 as a Committee. The AIRR Community now comprises several hundred stakeholders, and includes working groups developing white papers, community standards, and planning future meetings. The governance structure of the Society, including the AIRR Community, is discussed here, and the organizational chart can be seen here.
To learn more about the AIRR Community and its work, please explore the items in the dropdown menu under the ‘AIRR Community’ tab.
