Tools for the Analysis of B Cell Clone Diversity in Immune Repertoires

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

12:00 PM-2:00 PM

BIOMED PhD Thesis Defense

Title:
Tools for the Analysis of B Cell Clone Diversity in Immune Repertoires

Speaker:
Bochao Zhang, PhD Candidate, School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, Drexel University

Advisor:
Uri Hershberg, PhD, Associate Professor, School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, Drexel University

Abstract:
The diversity of the immune repertoire is key to its ability to respond to disease. I have in my thesis developed methods to study this diversity and applied them to study the immune repertoire of B cells under different healthy and pathological conditions in the blood and in different tissues.

To characterize immune diversity, we must take into account that subsets of the repertoire are clonally related, i.e., share a common progenitor. This implies that each clone shares the same B cell receptor (BCR), or a set of highly related B cells separated by small sets of point mutations. For this reason, in my thesis, I have focused on characterizing the immune repertoire from a clonal perspective. This has led me to focus on three related aims: (1) how can we identify sets of clonal related cells? (2) how can we characterize the diversity of clones in the immune repertoire, and (3) how can we characterize the diversity of B cells members of clones that differ by mutation.

In pursuit of the above aims, I have developed new statistical, analytical, and visualization methods to study immune repertoires. I have developed a method to reliably identify germline genes and estimate the similarity amongst germline V genes. I have applied this method to the study of healthy and pathological human immune systems and developed methods to quantify the overlapping that occurs between tissues and analyze the mutation and selection in human immune repertoires.

Contact Information

Ken Barbee
215-895-1335
barbee@drexel.edu