Affinity and Evolution of B Cell Lineages Following SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination

​Our next session of High-Affinity Talks will feature Thomas Dupic, Team Leader at CIML, who will present new insights into how B-cell repertoires evolve in response to infection and repeated vaccination.

​His team longitudinally tracked the B-cell repertoires of 10 individuals following SARS-CoV-2 infection and subsequent vaccinations. They reconstructed the naïve sequences of a curated set of 10,000 clonal lineages in vitro and measured their affinity for the spike protein receptor-binding domain of SARS-CoV-2.

​Their findings reveal that while the overall properties of the repertoire, including diversity, expansion, and V-gene usage, remained stable and similar to healthy individuals, the 'binder' lineages, whose naive sequence is capable of antigen binding, expanded more and had higher mutation rates.

​Their evolutionary patterns also differed markedly from non-binders. Among the binders, the high-affinity binder lineages showed the most activity and diversified more across the time points.

​They also demonstrate that lineages with identical naive sequences in different individuals evolve in similar ways. This comprehensive dataset of antibody-spike interactions in a real-world setting provides insights into detecting reacting clones within a repertoire and helps us understand how the functional diversity of the naive repertoire shapes the adaptive immune response to vaccination.

​This discussion will be hosted and moderated by MiLaboratories, the creators of the leading biologics discovery software.