Deep sequencing meets deep learning: Capturing dynamic features of lymph node antibody repertoires using convolution neural networks

Adrian Shepherd (primary)
Biological Sciences
Birkbeck
Anita Grigoriadis (secondary)
Cancer Studies
King's College London

Abstract

This project brings together two comparatively-novel approaches – antibody repertoire sequencing using NGS (Rep-seq), and deep learning – to help characterise lymph node antibody repertoires. Rep-seq datasets commonly comprise millions of antibody sequences – too large for most conventional analytic approaches. Recently, deep learning techniques (e.g. convolution neural networks) have been applied to large, high-dimensional sequence datasets.

The aim of this project is to create deep learning predictors for identifying key attributes of antibody repertoires that have been extracted from uninvolved (non-tumour bearing) lymph nodes.


References

1. Irshad, Sheeba, et al. “RORγt+ Innate Lymphoid Cells Promote Lymph Node Metastasis of Breast Cancers.” Cancer research 77.5 (2017): 1083-1096.

2. Lees, William D., and Adrian J. Shepherd. “Utilities for high-throughput analysis of B-cell clonal lineages.” Journal of immunology research 2015 (2015).

3. Zeng, Haoyang, et al. “Convolutional neural network architectures for predicting DNA–protein binding.” Bioinformatics 32.12 (2016): i121-i127.

4. Shepherd, Adrian J. Second-Order Methods for Neural Networks: Fast and Reliable Training Methods for Multi-Layer Perceptrons. Perspectives in Neural Computing series, Springer, May 1997.

5. DeKosky, Brandon J., et al. “In-depth determination and analysis of the human paired heavy-and light-chain antibody repertoire.” Nature medicine 21.1 (2015): 86-91.


BBSRC Area
Genes, development and STEM* approaches to biology
Area of Biology
Immunology
Techniques & Approaches
BioinformaticsMathematics / StatisticsMolecular Biology