BASIC: B-cell receptor (BCR) assembly from single cell RNA-seq

The B-cell receptor (BCR) enables individual B cells to identify diverse antigens, including bacterial and viral proteins. While advances in RNA-seq have enabled high throughput profiling of transcript expression in single cells, the unique task of assembling the full-length heavy and light chain sequences from single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) in B cells has been largely unstudied. We developed a new software tool, BASIC, which allows investigators to use scRNA-seq for assembling BCR sequences at single cell level. To demonstrate the utility of our software, we subjected single B cells from a human donor to scRNA-seq, assembled the full-length heavy and the light chains, and experimentally confirmed these results by using single cell primer based nested PCRs and Sanger sequencing.