Detecting and quantifying antibody reactivity in PhIP-Seq data with BEER

Abstract

Summary

Because of their high abundance, easy accessibility in peripheral blood, and relative stability ex vivo, antibodies serve as excellent records of environmental exposures and immune responses. Phage Immuno-Precipitation Sequencing (PhIP-Seq) is the most efficient technique available for assessing antibody binding to hundreds of thousands of peptides at a cohort scale. PhIP-Seq is a high-throughput approach for assessing antibody reactivity to hundreds of thousands of candidate epitopes. Accurate detection of weakly reactive peptides is particularly important for characterizing the development and decline of antibody responses. Here, we present BEER (Bayesian Enrichment Estimation in R), a software package specifically developed for the quantification of peptide reactivity from PhIP-Seq experiments. BEER implements a hierarchical model and produces posterior probabilities for peptide reactivity and a fold change estimate to quantify the magnitude. BEER also offers functionality to infer peptide reactivity based on the edgeR package, though the improvement in speed is offset by slightly lower sensitivity compared to the Bayesian approach, specifically for weakly reactive peptides.

Availability and implementation

BEER is implemented in R and freely available from the Bioconductor repository at https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/beer.html.

1 Introduction

Understanding interactions between the immune system and antigens is important to advance our understanding of the disease, disease progression and for the development of therapeutics. Phage-ImmunoPrecipitation sequencing (PhIP-Seq) is a high-throughput technique to characterize antibody responses to extensive antigen libraries (Larman et al., 2011). Normalized sera are mixed with bacteriophages expressing the target peptides of interest, forming antibody–phage complexes (Fig. 1, left). These complexes are precipitated with magnetic beads, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplified and barcoded for multiplexing. The resulting product is sequenced and a matrix containing the number of sequencing reads with alignment to each peptide in the library for each sample is generated. Any alignment tool suitable for DNA or RNA short-read sequencing such as Bowtie (Langmead, 2010) or exact matching via grep can be used to align sequencing reads to the peptides in the library, and fastq files are then converted to read count matrices (for a detailed bioinformatics workflow including recommendations for demultiplexing and read alignment to the reference sequence database, see Mohan et al., 2018). PhIP-Seq libraries include VirScan (Xu et al., 2015), quantifying antibody binding to around 100 000 peptides spanning the genomes of more than 200 viruses that infect humans, among others. The primary objective is to identify antibody reactive peptides and to quantify the strength of antibody binding. PhIP-Seq experiments require the use of negative controls (so-called ‘beads-only’ or ‘mock immunoprecipitations’ lacking antibody input), which are included as 4–8 wells of a 96-well plate, and are compared to the read counts from each individual serum sample on the plate. We recently developed and implemented BEER, a Bayesian framework for identifying reactive peptides (Chen et al., 2022, preprint available at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.19.476926v1).

Fig. 1.

Pipeline for generating and analyzing data for PhIP-Seq experiments. Left: Serum samples are mixed with bacteriophages expressing peptides from antigens of interest, forming antibody–phage complexes. The complexes are captured using magnetic beads and PCR amplified with barcoded primers for sample multiplexing. The resulting product is sequenced, demuxed and transformed into a matrix of read counts. Middle: The matrix of read counts, along with experimental, sample and peptide metadata are stored in a PhIPData object. Right: The core function of BEER is brew, which accepts a PhIPData object (named pd in the figure) and returns the original PhIPData object, augmented with the results in the assays and/or metadata containers

2 Features

PhIP-Seq experimental data are coordinated with sample and peptide metadata using the S4 class PhIPData (Chen et al., 2021). PhIPData extends SummarizedExperiment, enabling users to conveniently subset the data while preserving metadata information (Morgan et al., 2021). Peptide metadata can be added to a PhIPData object from a database of peptide libraries. Additionally, PhIPData supports peptide subsetting using user-defined aliases for viruses (Fig. 1, center).

2.1 Detecting reactive peptides

In the Bayesian approach for detecting peptide reactivity, we model the observed read counts as a Binomial distribution, with a Binomial sample size equal to the total number of reads in the sample, and varying Binomial ‘success probabilities’ (i.e. the probability of pulling a read) for different samples and peptides. These probabilities depend on whether a sample is a serum sample or a beads-only (mock IP) control. We model the overall distributions for the peptides in a beads-only sample using Beta distributions with peptide-specific shape parameters, borrowing strength across peptides. The fold changes are modeled as shifted Gamma distributions for the enriched peptides, and the enrichment status is modeled as Bernoulli. Both the proportion of peptides expected to be enriched and the attenuation constant are modeled as Beta distributions (Chen et al., 2022). The model was implemented using the Just Another Gibbs Sampler (JAGS) infrastructure and was executed in the statistical environment R using the interface implemented in the add-on package rjags (Plummer, 2019). The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers can conveniently be run in parallel, for example, for all peptides on the virus level.

The core function of BEER is brew (Fig. 1, right). Each sample is compared individually to all beads-only samples. brew first estimates the underlying distribution of reads pulled for beads-only samples (see Section 2.2). The remaining parameters describing the prior distributions can be specified in the prior.params argument in brew (defaults are offered). To improve scalability, clearly enriched peptides [based on maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs)] above some user-defined thresholds are excluded, and prior parameters are re-estimated from the beads-only samples for the remaining peptides. MLEs are also used to initialize the MCMC sampler in JAGS. Parameters to specify the MCMC sampling scheme (such as the total number of iterations, the thinning parameters, the number of burn-in iterations, the randomization seed, etc.) are defined by jags.params in brew. The MCMC chains are summarized as posterior means for the model parameters, the key parameter being the binary indicator denoting whether a peptide elicits an enriched antibody response in the serum sample (Chen et al., 2022). In addition, estimated fold changes, the proportion of enriched peptides per sample, etc. can be added to the PhIPData object (Fig. 1, right column). Helper functions such as getBF, which returns the estimated Bayes factors in a new PhIPData assay, can be used to visualize the results. The false-positive rate can be estimated using a beads-only round robin, comparing each beads-only sample to all other beads-only samples on the same plate by setting the argument beadsRR in brew to TRUE.

2.2 Edger functionality

Since the output from both PhIP-Seq and RNA-Seq experiments are read count matrices, existing software for normalization and analysis of RNA-Seq data such as edgeR (Robinson et al., 2010) can also be applied to PhIP-Seq data. However, important differences in the data structures, experimental design and study objectives exist between the two approaches (Chen et al., 2022). We do recommend using existing functionality in the edgeR package for PhIP-Seq data to estimate the shape parameters for the Beta prior distributions for the probabilities of peptides pulling reads. edgeR uses an empirical Bayes approach to approximate the larger than binomial variability observed in the read counts, which improves performance compared to other estimation methods such as methods of moments and maximum likelihood estimation that do not borrow strength across peptides (Chen et al., 2022).

Since edgeR does not rely on MCMC procedures and thus generates inference faster than BEER, we further investigated the performance of edgeR analyzing PhIP-Seq data in a two-group comparison with the mock IP samples in one group and a single serum sample in the other group (assuming equality of group variances) and found that BEER and edgeR are equally effective in detecting moderately and strongly reactive peptides, but BEER is needed to detect weakly reactive peptides (Chen et al., 2022). For user convenience, we included an edgeR-based pipeline for PhIP-Seq data in the BEER package. The method (classic likelihood ratio test or quasi-likelihood F-test) can be chosen using the de.method argument in the runEdgeR function. Two-sided edgeR P-values are converted into one-sided P-values (only enriched read counts indicate peptide reactivity) and are added with the estimated log fold changes to the PhIPData object via the function runEdgeR. Functionality also includes the round robin approach described above to assess the false-positive rate, which can be executed in runEdgeR with the argument beadsRR.

3 Conclusion

The Bioconductor package BEER provides two approaches for identifying reactive peptides from PhIP-Seq data, a Bayesian approach using an MCMC sampler, and an approach implemented in the RNA-Seq software package edgeR. The former is more sensitive detecting weakly reactive peptides, which may be particularly important when analyzing historic infections or the early stages of a developing antibody response. The implementations of the respective main functions brew and runEdgeR support parallelization for running multiple samples on one plate using the package BiocParallel in R (Morgan et al., 2022). BEER returns posterior probabilities for read count enrichment but does not explicitly generate a list of reactive peptides. We recommend to use posterior probabilities larger than 50% to delineate reactive peptides (Chen et al., 2022).

Funding

This work was supported by the United States National Institutes of General Medical Science NIGMS [R01 GM136724] and Allergy and Infectious Diseases [NIAID R01 AI095068], as well as the National Cancer Institute [NCI P50 CA062924 and NCI P30 CA006973].

Conflict of Interest: H.B.L. is an inventor on a patent describing the VirScan technology (US patent no. 15/105,722), a founder of Portal Bioscience, Alchemab and ImmuneID, and an advisor to TScan Therapeutics. R.B.S. is a founder and consultant of Delfi Diagnostics, and owns Delfi Diagnostics stock. Johns Hopkins University owns equity in Delfi Diagnostics and Portal Bioscience.

Data Availability

No new data were generated or analysed in support of this research.