Abstract
The diversity of immunoglobulin (IG) and T cell receptor (TR) chains depends on several mechanisms: combinatorial diversity, which is a consequence of the number of V, D and J genes and the N-REGION diversity, which creates an extensive and clonal somatic diversity at the V-J and V-D-J junctions. For the IG, the diversity is further increased by somatic hypermutations. The number of different junctions per chain and per individual is estimated to be 1012 . We have chosen the human TRAV-TRAJ junctions as an example in order to characterize the required criteria for a standardized analysis of the IG and TR V-J and V-D-J junctions, based on the IMGT-ONTOLOGY concepts, and to serve as a first IMGT junction reference set (IMGT, http://imgt.cines.fr). We performed a thorough statistical analysis of 212 human rearranged TRAV-TRAJ sequences, which were aligned and analysed by the integrated IMGT/V-QUEST software, which includes IMGT/JunctionAnalysis, then manually expert-verified. Furthermore, we compared these 212 sequences with 37 other human TRAV-TRAJ junction sequences for which some particularities (potential sequence polymorphisms, sequencing errors, etc.) did not allow IMGT/JunctionAnalysis to provide the correct biological results, according to expert verification. Using statistical learning, we constructed an automatic warning system to predict if new, automatically analysed TRAV-TRAJ sequences should be manually re-checked. We estimated the robustness of this automatic warning system