計算生命科学の基礎７ Analysis of antibody-antigen interactions from sequence data

Antibodies are the soluble portion of B cell receptors (BCRs). Since antibodies are a critical part of our immune system’s defense against disease, there is growing interest in identifying BCR sequences associated with specific disease-related antigens. In the recent COVID-19 pandemic, for example, a number of groups reported antibody sequences against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein within months of the outbreak (Brouwer, et al., 2020; Cao, et al., 2020; Chi, et al., 2020). Structure determination of antibody-antigen complexes is a low throughput task, so there is a need for computational methods that can characterize the epitopes of disease-specific antibodies from sequence information alone.