Abstract
The analysis of adaptive immune repertoires in autoimmune and infectious diseases represents a fascinating challenge because of the natural huge diversity of the antigen receptors that are the immunoglobulins or antibodies and T cell receptors, expressed by B cells and T cells, respectively. The high throughput analysis resulting from the next generation sequencing technologies offers an invaluable large scale characterization of the expressed repertoires and, consequently, a better understanding of the protective and pathogenic immune responses. IMGT®, the international ImMunoGeneTics information system® (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Montpellier University) is the global reference in immunogenetics and immunoinformatics. By its creation in 1989, IMGT® marked the advent of immunoinformatics, which emerged at the interface between immunogenetics and bioinformatics. IMGT® is specialized in the immunoglobulins or antibodies, T cell receptors, major histocompatibility proteins of humans and other vertebrate species, and in the proteins of the immunoglobulin superfamily and major histocompatibility superfamily of any species. IMGT® has been built on the IMGT-ONTOLOGY axioms and concepts, which bridged the gap between genes, sequences and three-dimensional structures. The concepts include the IMGT® standardized keywords (identification), IMGT® standardized labels (description), IMGT® standardized nomenclature (classification), IMGT unique numbering and IMGT Colliers de Perles (numerotation). IMGT® comprises seven databases, 15,000 pages of web resources and 17 tools, and includes data from fishes to humans, for basic to veterinary, medical and translational research. IMGT/HighV-QUEST, the high throughput version of IMGT/V-QUEST and IMGT/Junction Analysis, created in 2010, is the first and, so far, the only online portal for analysis of the immunoglobulin and T cell receptor repertoires obtained from next generation sequencing. High-quality results contribute to the large scale vision of antigen receptor repertoires and understanding of the adaptive immune responses (protective in vaccination, cancer and infections and pathogenic in autoimmunity) for diagnosis, prognosis and therapy.