
A fast and accurate method, HILARy, is introduced to efficiently partition B-cell receptor repertoire sequencing data into clonal families, which are key to understanding the evolution and dynamics of the adaptive immune response.


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B-cell repertoires are characterized by a diverse set of receptors of distinct specificities generated through two processes of somatic diversification: V(D)J recombination and somatic hypermutations. B cell clonal families stem from the same V(D)J recombination event, but differ in their hypermutations. Clonal families identification is key to understanding B-cell repertoire function, evolution and dynamics. We present HILARy (High-precision Inference of Lineages in Antibody Repertoires), an efficient, fast and precise method to identify clonal families from high-throughput sequencing datasets. HILARy combines probabilistic models that capture the receptor generation and selection statistics with adapted clustering methods to achieve consistently high inference accuracy. It automatically leverages the phylogenetic signal of shared mutations in difficult repertoire subsets. Exploiting the high sensitivity of the method, we find the statistics of evolutionary properties such as the site frequency spectrum and dN/dS ratio do not depend on the junction length. We also identify a broad range of selection pressures scanning two orders of magnitude.

### Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Combining mutation and recombination statistics to infer clonal families in antibody repertoires

efficient-inference-of-clonal-families-from-antibody-repertoire-sequencing-data


Efficient Inference of Clonal Families from Antibody Repertoire Sequencing Data
