Macaca fascicularis Genome IGH locus description. Macaca fascicularis

Cynomolgus macaques (Macaca fascicularis) have become an important animal model for human disease and for biomedical research within the last several years. This is particularly true for the study of the immune system response toward infectious diseases or vaccine candidates associated with those pathogens. Despite their increasing importance as animal models, the Cynomolgus macaque genome is not as well characterized as Rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) such that molecular studies are hindered for this model. More importantly, the lack of knowledge about the immunoglobulin (Ig) locus organization directly impacts analysis of the humoral response in Cynomolgus macaques. Recent advances in Next Generation Sequence technique to analyze Ig repertoires open the opportunity to deeply characterize the humoral immune response. However, the Ig locus organization for the animal is required to dissect Ig repertoires. Here we describe the Ig heavy chain locus on chromosome 7 of the Cynomolgus macaque draft genome. Our annotation includes several functional segments for the Ig heavy chain (variable, diversity, and joining segments) and genes for the constant region of Ig isotopes (IGHG, IGHD, IGHM, IGHA and IGHE). The description and annotation of the Ig heavy chain segments for the Cynomolgus macaques will allow the scientific community to utilize the Ig germline information to better characterize the B cell repertoire. It will not only allow the precise assignment of the V, D and J segment utilized to form the rearrangement, but also permit the correct calculation of somatic hypermutation of the Ig paratope.