Full-length single-cell BCR sequencing paired with RNA sequencing reveals convergent responses to vaccination

Single-cell RNA sequencing can resolve transcriptional features from individual cells, but techniques capable of resolving the variable regions of B cell receptors (BCRs) – defining features that confer antigen specificity to B cells – remain limited, especially from widely-used 3`-barcoded libraries. Here, we report a method that can recover paired, full-length variable region sequences of BCRs from 3`-barcoded single-cell whole transcriptome libraries. We applied this method to produce accurate, full-length BCR sequences from cDNA of human PBMC generated following the 10x Genomics 3`GEX protocol. B cells of interest were isolated from PBMC using immunomagnetic selection and analyzed with the 10x Genomics 3` GEX platform for single-cell RNA sequencing.