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Announcing the AIRR Community Seminar Series!

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Join the AIRR Community for a 90 minute “lab-style” virtual seminar.  Each month an established and an early career scientist will discuss their AIRR-seq related research. Seminar time will be 16:00 – 17:30 Central European Time (CET), typically on the 4th Thursday of the month.  Most talks will be recorded and posted on the AIRR Community YouTube channel.  In the spirit of open science collaboration we want to give credit where credit is due – this seminar series is modelled after and a follow-up to the highly successful iReceptor Plus Seminar Series: Theories and Applications of Immune Repertoires which ran from 2020-2022. Check out their website for many scientifically related talks!

Register today for the April 27th talks presented by Hashem Koohy from Oxford University and Marcos Vieria from University of Chicago.

Check out the seminar series web page for upcoming seminars and registration links.

 

AIRR Data Commons and iReceptor Science Gateway Start Major Collaboration with Type-1 Diabetes Researchers

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The AIRR Community is pleased to announce the addition of a new Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) focused repository in the AIRR Data Commons. This is a collaboration between the iReceptor team (Simon Fraser University), The Sugar Science group, the Aaron Michels Lab (University of Colorado), and the Todd Brusko Lab (University of Florida) among others. This repository contains the first fully HLA/MHC genotyped study that adheres to the the AIRR v1.4 MHC genotype standard, with over 62 million annotated sequences from 359 repertoires from the Mitchell et al. longitudinal study of TCR repertoires (TRB locus) in children who progressed to T1D. This new T1D AIRR-seq data is searchable through the iReceptor Gateway and there is of course more T1D data to come from this collaboration. We encourage the community to share this valuable type of data!

AIRR Community Standards v1.4 Now Available

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The AIRR Community is pleased to announce the release of v1.4 of the AIRR Standards, including v1.2 of the AIRR Data Commons API (ADC API) to query AIRR compliant data repositories. This release enables additional compatibility with single-cell and emerging technologies, supports extended data/metadata capture, and improves data standardization and integration. Major changes include updated quantification fields and conversion of several fields to ontology references to provide consistency across studies.

Several exciting experimental releases are included in this update: new Germline and Genotype schemas for documenting VDJ germline reference sequences and subject VDJ and MHC genotypes, extensions to the Cell schema for storing single-cell gene expression and receptor reactivity, and data aggregation schemas to facilitate more complex and reproducible analyses.

The ADC API specification included in this release contains new capabilities for querying AIRR v1.4 Schema objects including Clone, Cell, CellExpression, and Receptor objects.

Check out these key links:

Python Package

R Package

Release Notes

Github

Announcing the inaugural AIRR Community Service Prize Winner!

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We are thrilled to announce the inaugural AIRR Community Service Award winner, which recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the AIRR Community. The first recipient of this award was Dr. Christian Busse, a distinguished immunologist and pioneer in the field of AIRR research who was presented with the award at the AIRR Community Meeting VI in La Jolla, California in May 2022. 

The AIRR Community Service Award was established to acknowledge individuals who have demonstrated a deep commitment to the AIRR Community, including contributions to the development of standards and tools for the analysis of immune receptor repertoires, advancing the field through research, and sharing knowledge with other members of the community.

Christian Busse, of DKFZ in Germany, has been an active member of the AIRR Community for many years, serving as a member of the Executive Sub-committee and Co-lead of the Standards Working Group. In these roles he contributes to the development of standards and best practices for AIRR analysis, helping to ensure that the Community continues to advance and grow.

We would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Christian Busse on this well-deserved award. His contributions to the AIRR Community have been truly outstanding, and we are honored to recognize him as the first recipient of the AIRR Community Service Award!

AIRR Community Meeting VI – That’s a Wrap!

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The AIRR-C “raison d’etre” is the standardization of AIRR-seq data and its associated metadata, related software tools, pipelines and repositories, etc., as well as efforts aimed at other users, institutions, agencies, journals, and societies to promote international efforts to optimize FAIR practices: making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable! Similarly, the spirit of accessibility of data, and training, equally applies to individuals from diverse backgrounds, including those from under-represented groups.  Using these premises as inspiration the sixth AIRR-C meeting theme “Exploring New Frontiers” was established.

The sixth AIRR Community Meeting (#AIRRC6) was held in La Jolla, CA from May 17-19, 2022.  The meeting had two themed “Challenge Sessions” meant to: (i) Initiate and implement a strategic plan for the AIRR Community that integrates the Working Groups’ activities toward the central goal of universally accepted AIRR-seq data standards; (ii) Introduce the Community to multidimensional systems approaches for characterizing immune responses, and how AIRR-seq data can benefit such approaches. 

Meetings and presentations took place at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines as well as virtually. The meeting provided opportunities for investigators and trainees to network, to participate in AIRR Community Working Groups and Sub-committee meetings, to participate in poster sessions, to attend software tool demonstrations and tutorials, to participate in student mentoring sessions and matchups and to attend an industry networking reception with a “hot topics in the field” round table session.  We were delighted to have such an incredible turnout of industry collaborators and wish to extend our sincere thank you to our generous sponsors.

AIRR Community Meetings are the premier event for research on adaptive immune-receptor repertoires. They are also the primary location where the AIRR Community’s Working Groups and Sub-committees come together in one location to discuss how to push standardization in AIRR-sequencing (AIRR-seq) data and analysis forward.  For complete details about AIRR-C Meeting VI check out the final meeting booklet and the video recordings on the AIRR-C YouTube channel.

Just like the biology of immune repertoires is high-dimensional, this meeting’s success was as well!  We gathered some of the numbers that best describe the success of the AIRR-C VI meeting.

  • 4 Keynote speakers: Dennis Burton (Scripps Research), Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam (Karolinska Institutet),  Shane Crotty (La Jolla Institute for Immunology)  Atul Butte (University of California, San Francisco)
  • 144 in person attendees, 89 remote attendees, 20 countries represented
  • 13 Invited speakers, 6 contributed talks
  • 45 posters, 8 lightning demos, 6 deep dive tutorials
  • 5 hot topics in the field discussions
  • 19 sponsors – 5 gold, 5 silver, 7 bronze, 2 institutional 
  • 8 NIH travel award recipients

A big thank you again to our meeting sponsors for their generous sponsorship and engagement and to the AIRR-C Meetings Sub-committee members for their tireless effort in creating such an exceptional event.  

Looking forward to AIRR-C Meeting VII – rumour has it that it will be in Europe in Spring 2024!