AntigenApp: a laboratory data management system for nanobody generation and sequence analysis

Journal article

Motivation: Nanobodies are single domain antibodies derived from the unique heavy chain-only immunoglobulins of the camelid family, and have broad applications in biosciences, including as imaging and diagnostic agents. The generation of nanobodies is a multi-stage experimental process for which we have developed AntigenApp a laboratory data management system for nanobody generation and sequence analysis. Results: AntigenApp is a web application and database built to capture data generated during all steps of the nanobody discovery pipeline and to provide built-in analysis capabilities of the experimental results. This includes enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay optical density measurements, sequencing results, nanobody domain labelling, and search/clustering capabilities using protein BLAST. The tool incorporates a standardized naming convention that is automatically applied to nanobodies stored in the database and we envisage the tool being of interest to the wider nanobody community for in-house use. Availability and implementation: AntigenApp is available from https://github.com/rosalindfranklininstitute/antigen-app under the Apache 2.0 licence and published https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17397055.

Authors: Lubbock, ALR; Eyssen, LE-; Parker, K; Basham, M; Shemilt, LA

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Bioinformatics
• Volume: 41
• Issue: 12
• Pages: btaf642
• Article number: btaf642
• Publication date: 2025-12-01
• Acceptance date: 2025-11-20
• DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaf642
• EISSN: 1367-4811
• ISSN: 1367-4803
• Language: English