Summary
During affinity maturation, clonal expansion correlates with antigen binding, and larger clonal families are more likely to bind with higher affinity than smaller ones (1). Put another way, overrepresented antibodies are more likely to be strong binders than weak binders. This fact was used to train AntiBERTy (2).
Details
In informal conversations with NGS scientists, however, the correlation between these two was noted to be imperfect.
Figures
Ref (3)
See also
1.
Robinson WH. Sequencing the functional antibody repertoire—diagnostic and therapeutic discovery. Nature Reviews Rheumatology. 2014;11(3):171–82. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrrheum.2014.220
2.
Ruffolo JA, Gray JJ, Sulam J. Deciphering antibody affinity maturation with language models and weakly supervised learning. 2021; Available from: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07782
3.
Tan Y-C, Blum LK, Kongpachith S, Ju C-H, Cai X, Lindstrom TM, et al. High-throughput sequencing of natively paired antibody chains provides evidence for original antigenic sin shaping the antibody response to influenza vaccination. Clinical Immunology. 2014;151(1):55–65. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clim.2013.12.008