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Activity Number: 467 - Statistical Advances for Cancer Genomics and Immunogenomics - from Single-Cell to Correlated Population
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2018 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: Biometrics Section
Abstract #329594
Title: A Discrete Threshold Model for the Clone Size Distribution of the Immune Repertoire
Author(s): Qunhua Li* and Hillary Koch and Dmytro Starenki and Sara Cooper and Rick Myers
Companies: Penn State University and Penn State University and Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology and HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology and HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology
Keywords: diversity of immune repertoire; immune; Pareto distribution; threshold model; T cell receptor
Abstract:

Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing of the T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire provide a new, detailed characterization of the immune system. The diversity of TCR can reflect general immune potency and the dynamics of immune response to pathogens. It potentially can be used as an early indicator to differentiate patients who respond to the treatment from those who do not. Though estimators borrowed from ecology literature, such as, species richness, are often used to measure the diversity, these measures can be sensitive to sequencing depth and may not faithfully reflect the true diversity.

In this work, we propose a novel threshold model, based on a generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) and a truncate Gamma distribution, to model the diversity of the TCR repertoire. This model can be related to the stochastic process of clonal formation, thus can provide biologically meaningful interpretation. We evaluated the performance on both simulated and real datasets. Our results show that it is able to differentiate individuals with different clinical outcomes. It is also robust across a range of sequencing depths.


Authors who are presenting talks have a * after their name.

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