Overview

With technical breakthroughs in the throughput and read-length of next-generation sequencing platforms, antibody repertoire sequencing is becoming an increasingly important tool for detailed characterization of the immune response to infection and immunization. Accordingly, there is a need for open, scalable software for the genetic analysis of repertoire-scale antibody sequence data.

We built abstar to be a modular component of these analyses. abstar is engineered to be highly flexible, capable of processing a single sequence or billions of sequences and scaling from individual laptops to large clusters of cloud computing instances.

Workflows

In addition to V(D)J germline gene assignment and primary antibody sequence annotation, abstar contains utilities for sequence acquisition, pre-processing, and database import. abstar also exposes a high-level public API to many of the core functions, which allows users to easily construct custom analysis workflows using multiple abstar utilities as well as other third-party tools. To ease integration of abstar into currently existing antibody analysis pipelines based on IMGT, abstar can optionally produce output that mimics the IMGT-HighV/Quest Summary output file.

File formats

abstar accepts standard FASTA or FASTQ files and produces, by default, JSON-formatted output. This output format allows us to build the output using data structures that match the way we process data programatically. JSON is also easily importable into NoSQL databases like MongoDB. We have found NoSQL databases to be very well suited for performing downstream analyses of antibody repertoire data, as the flexible schema allows for easy updating of sequence records with additional annotation information. Although additional data can be added to relational databases, querying this data often involves joining tables, which can require significant optimization for very large datasets.

Scalability

Cloud computing has dramatically changed the landscape of high-performance computing (HPC), and has allowed small academic labs to ‘rent’ access to computational resources that would have been previously far outside their budget. abstar is tightly integrated with abcloud, which provides tools for launching, configuring and managing clusters of compute instances on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Using the Celery distributed task queue, jobs are distributed to worker nodes and processed in parallel.

In order to maintain compatability with alternate cloud computing platforms with minimal effort, an abstar Docker image is also provided.