bbeaR: an R package and framework for epitope-specific antibody profiling.

Abstract

Analysis of epitope-specific antibody repertoires has provided novel insights into the pathogenesis of inflammatory disorders, especially allergies. A novel multiplex immunoassay, termed Bead-Based Epitope Assay (BBEA), was developed to quantify levels of epitope-specific immunoglobulins, including IgE, IgG, IgA and IgD isotypes. bbeaR is an open-source R package, developed for the BBEA, provides a framework to import, process and normalize .csv data files exported from the Luminex reader, evaluate various quality control metrics, analyze differential epitope-binding antibodies with linear modeling, visualize results and map epitopes' amino acid sequences to their respective primary protein structures. bbeaR enables streamlined and reproducible analysis of epitope-specific antibody profiles. bbeaR is open-source and freely available from GitHub as an R package: https://github.com/msuprun/bbeaR; vignettes included. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.