AIRR Community#

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.

Introduction to the AIRR Standards#

The AIRR Community is developing a set of standards for describing, reporting, storing, and sharing adaptive immune receptor repertoire (AIRR) data, such as sequences of antibodies and T cell receptors (TCRs). Some specific efforts include:

  • The MiAIRR standard for describing minimal information about AIRR datasets, including sample collection and data processing information.

  • Data submission guidelines and workflows.

  • Data representations (file format) specifications for storing large amounts of annotated AIRR data.

  • API to query and download AIRR data from repositories/databases as part of the AIRR Data Commons.

  • A community standard for software tools which will allow conforming tools to gain community recognition.

  • Set of reference software tools for reading, writing and validating data in the AIRR standards.

  • A database and web submission frontend for inferred germline genes

Table of Contents#