Biological Reagents Working Group

Purpose:

To provide the AIRR community with biological calibrators and reagents for evaluation of AIRR-seq. 

This working group will be responsible for coordinating the development of reference samples that can be used as controls. The working group will reach out to established organizations such as NIST and Genome in a Bottle, as well as companies like ATCC and Novartis to help encourage ease of use and broad adoption.

The goal of our working group is to be able to recommend a set of biological standards that can be used for normalization of data sets. This will allow more direct comparison of data generated by different library prep methods. Ultimately we would like to have DNA and RNA spike-ins, in addition to cell mixes that can be used for this purpose.

 

Goals:

For 2018:

  • Write a manuscript reviewing biological standards and other analytical controls for immune repertoire profiling experiments by NGS
  • Create a questionnaire to survey scientists regarding their needs for standards and calibrators in AIRR experiments
  • Establish a collection of such standards for inter-lab comparisons and ultimately communal use
  • Write a second manuscript about one or more specific assay standards.

Long-term:

  • Identify biological calibrators and reagents
  • Outreach to academic and commercial partners 
  • Produce and share selected calibrators and reagents
  • Labs/protocols for production
  • Legal agreements for distribution 
  • Evaluate products 
  • Lab survey on standard B cell and T cell samples, including calibrators (MiAIRR data compliant) 
  • Define statistical measures (in collaboration with other WGs) 

 

Products 

  • Validated reagents 
  • Publication 1: calibrator validation 
  • Publication 2: generation of MiAIRR compliant data using validated reagents

 

 

Members

Co-leaders: Encarnita Marrioti-Ferrandiz and Maggie Bostick

Members: Encarnita Mariotti-Ferrandiz, Maggie Bostick, Nina Luning Prak, Christian Busse, Uri Hershberg,  Johannes Trück,  Jacob Sherkow, and Davide Bagnara