We could generate similar reports to the one shown above. I think eye-catching visualisations are the key, even if we don’t fully know the implications of different repertoire features at this point. A few ideas below, and what would be useful to do to help achieve them.
- Your repertoire is diverse! I find that people’s eyes are always drawn to a nice network representation of a repertoire. Even if it doesn’t say much personal, it is something that looks fun, and illustrates how diverse the repertoire is.
- How does your repertoire compare to others? PCA of broad repertoire characteristics and where you fit (diversity, CDR3 length, mutation, VJ, etc). Need a good baseline dataset of healthy people so we can then see how people compare to this.
- How mature is your repertoire? We know how some repertoire features change with age, and would be fun to see if we could predict the age of the people based on their repertoire features alone.
- What pathogens have you been exposed to? This is probably the most interesting, but also the most difficult at the moment. Relies on having a database of previously described antigen-specific sequences with which to annotate the datasets (see this thread). While currently the number of sequences of known specificity is fairly limited, I think this will rapidly grow as more people apply RepSeq to various disease/vaccination cohorts, and we still may be able to get a rough idea.
Does anyone know of any immune repertoire startups already doing this kind of thing? If we could get people interested in having their immune repertoires sequenced, it would then be a great research resource too.