In collaboration with the histocompatibility laboratory at Emory, we are happy to share a technology demonstration connecting their DPB1 Compatibility Tool with the NMDP Calculated Panel Reactive Antibodies (CPRA) calculator developed by our lab.
HLA nomenclature for the DPB1 locus does not include the concept of serology or allele families in the allele name, making compatibility assessments challenging.
For this demo, we use a HLA Antibody Markup Language (HAML) XML format we developed for the 18th International HLA and Immunogenetics Workshop (IHIW) to populate HLA Class II Single Antigen Bead (SAB) panel data in the DPB1 tool. Based on a fixed MFI threshold, a subset of DPB1 beads can be automatically assigned positive. This tool allows the user to identify patterns of DPB1 hypervariable region amino acid polymorphisms among beads in the panel. The DPB1 tool then passes a list of unacceptable antigens either as two-field alleles and as DPB1 hypervariable regions if assigned. The DPB1 tool interactively refreshes CPRA values in real time using a web services interface the NMDP CPRA calculator.
The main benefit of the tool is that alleles determined to be electronically incompatible can more easily be listed as unacceptable antigens, and their impact on sensitization can be understood immediately.
From this technology demonstration, we can envision a constellation of web tools and microservices could one day accomplish complex tasks by talking to one another using structured electronic messaging formats for histocompatibility data. Our lab and others plan to continue the development of such tools.
Please find our ePoster #69 at the American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics (ASHI) 2020 conference to watch a 3-minute walkthrough of this effort.
Try out the web tool at http://dpcompat.hlatools.org/
