Abstract

Understanding the clonal dynamics of immune cells can be of great clinical importance, both for diagnosis and monitoring disease and the success of therapy as well as for understanding the generation of therapeutic resistance. The advent of next-generation sequencing now allows us to probe the genetic diversity of immune receptors in B-cell populations, which promises to revolutionise our understanding of adaptive immune response. Having established methods for deep-sequencing B-cell RNA /DNA encoding antibodies, here I address:

- How have we used high-resolution characterisation to give insights into the B-cell response? - What are the applications of these new technologies? - Providing insight into immunity in the context of health and disease - Further developments of methodology now enable the simultaneous probing of both antibody function and specificity, providing a highly sensitive and powerful tool for understanding disease.