Intrinsic Disorder Analysis of Immune Receptor CDR3 Regions
Summary
This project investigates the structural flexibility of TCR and BCR CDR3 regions by predicting their intrinsic disorder using metapredict. I built a custom pipeline to extract receptor sequences from cancer patient BAM files, run disorder analysis, and compare CDR3 segments to V and J regions to highlight unique biophysical properties.
Project Highlights
- Developed a bioinformatics pipeline to extract CDR3 sequences from GDC-aligned BAM files using custom VDJ mining scripts and
SAMtools. - Validated extracted repertoires with
VDJdband processed data using R and Python. - Applied metapredict to generate per-residue disorder profiles for CDR3, V, and J segments.
- Visualized disorder scores to show CDR3s are moderately disordered but less so than flanking regions.
- Explored implications for antigen-binding flexibility and immune recognition.