Immunoglobulin transcript sequence and somatic hypermutation computation from unselected RNA-seq reads in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

IGHV mutation status is a well-established prognostic factor in chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and also provides crucial insights into tumor cell biology and function. Currently, determination of IGHV transcript sequence, from which mutation status is calculated, requires a specialized laboratory procedure. RNA sequencing is a method that provides high resolution, high dynamic range transcriptome data that can be used for differential expression, isoform discovery, and variant determination. In this paper, we demonstrate that unselected next-generation RNA sequencing can accurately determine the IGH@ sequence, including the complete sequence of the complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3), and mutation status of CLL cells, potentially replacing the current method which is a specialized, single-purpose Sanger-sequencing based test. Overall design: CLL cells were sequenced by mRNA-seq on the Illumina platform then subjected to the costom bioinformatic pipeline Ig-ID which yields IGH data

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Blachly JS, Ruppert AS, Zhao W, Long S, Flynn J, Flinn I, Jones J, Maddocks K, Andritsos L, Ghia EM, Rassenti LZ, Kipps TJ, de la Chapelle A, Byrd JC