Scientific Reports (Sep 2021)

Nanopore sequencing approach for immunoglobulin gene analysis in chronic lymphocytic leukemia

  • Crescenzio Francesco Minervini,
  • Cosimo Cumbo,
  • Immacolata Redavid,
  • Maria Rosa Conserva,
  • Paola Orsini,
  • Antonella Zagaria,
  • Luisa Anelli,
  • Nicoletta Coccaro,
  • Giuseppina Tota,
  • Luciana Impera,
  • Elisa Parciante,
  • Francesco Tarantini,
  • Annamaria Giordano,
  • Giorgina Specchia,
  • Pellegrino Musto,
  • Francesco Albano

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-97198-3
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 1
pp. 1 – 7

Abstract

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Abstract The evaluation of the somatic hypermutation of the clonotypic immunoglobulin heavy variable gene has become essential in the therapeutic management in chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients. European Research Initiative on Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia promotes good practices and standardized approaches to this assay but often they are labor-intensive, technically complex, with limited in scalability. The use of next-generation sequencing in this analysis has been widely tested, showing comparable accuracy and distinct advantages. However, the adoption of the next generation sequencing requires a high sample number (run batching) to be economically convenient, which could lead to a longer turnaround time. Here we present data from nanopore sequencing for the somatic hypermutation evaluation compared to the standard method. Our results show that nanopore sequencing is suitable for immunoglobulin heavy variable gene mutational analysis in terms of sensitivity, accuracy, simplicity of analysis and is less time-consuming. Moreover, our work showed that the development of an appropriate data analysis pipeline could lower the nanopore sequencing error rate attitude.