Back

A genomic platform for surveillance and antigen discovery in Plasmodium spp. using long-read amplicon sequencing

Plaza, D. F.; Zerebinski, J.; Broumou, I.; Lautenbach, M. J.; Ngasala, B.; Sundling, C.; Farnert, A.

2022-06-08 genomics
10.1101/2022.06.08.495295 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Many vaccine candidate proteins are under strong selective pressure to diversify in terms of antigenicity. We present a sequencing and data analysis platform for epidemiological surveillance and discovery of indel-rich vaccine antigens by long-read circular consensus sequencing (CCS) in multiclonal pathogen isolates. Our platform uses 40 PCR primers to asymmetrically barcode and identify multiclonal infections in pools of up to 384 samples. We validated the method using 235 mock infections combining 10 synthetic variants of the indel-rich gene merozoite surface protein 2 of Plasmodium falciparum at different concentrations and infection complexities, as well as 95 isolates from P. falciparum-infected residents of Nyamisati, Tanzania. We also constructed a fully automated analysis pipeline that streamlines the processing and interpretation of epidemiological and antigenic diversity data from demultiplexed FASTQ files. This platform can be easily adapted to other polymorphic antigens of interest in Plasmodium and other human pathogens.

Published in Cell Reports Methods · training set

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.