arda-mapper 2.0.3

Antigen Receptor Domain Annotation — fast TCR/BCR FR/CDR region annotation

arda — Antigen Receptor Domain Annotation

Versatile, fast, exact FR/CDR annotation of TCR and BCR sequences — mRNA and protein in FASTA, and reads in FASTQ from both amplicon and bulk RNA-seq — for nucleotide and amino-acid input, across all loci at once.

arda does the expensive IgBLAST work once, offline — building a pre-aligned reference database of every in-frame V·J germline scaffold with FR1–4 / CDR1–3 markup — then at runtime maps your sequences to that database with MMseqs2 and transfers the markup through the alignment in a small C++ hot path. The result is an AIRR-formatted annotation that matches IgBLAST (≈97% region concordance on real GenBank mRNA), from a plain CLI + Python library — no Docker, no workflow engine.

Why

IgBLAST is the gold standard but is slow to invoke per-batch and awkward to embed. arda keeps IgBLAST-quality region calls while being:

• Fast & scalable — MMseqs2 search + a C++ projection step; multiprocessing and SLURM-friendly from small FASTA to large FASTQ.
• Embeddable — import arda; arda.annotate_sequences(...).
• Easy to install — conda for the mmseqs binary, pip install -e . for the package + C++ extension; IgBLAST is fetched into a gitignored bin/ and is only needed to (re)build the reference DB, not at runtime.

Install

pip install arda-mapper   # from PyPI (imports as `arda`); binary wheels ship the C++ extension

mmseqs2 (the search backend) is fetched/managed by arda at runtime. For development — and to get the committed germline references on disk — use setup.sh:

bash setup.sh            # creates conda env `arda`, fetches IgBLAST, pip install -e .
conda activate arda

Flags: --no-conda (use the active env), --build-db (rebuild references after install), --tests (run the fast suites). The committed database/vdj/<organism>/ references mean most users never need to build anything; a pip-only install builds them on first use (or set $ARDA_HOME to a checkout).

Supported organisms: human, mouse (full IG + TR), rat, rabbit, rhesus_monkey (IG only — IgBLAST ships no TR internal annotation for these).

CLI

arda info                                   # resolved paths + tool availability
arda annotate -i reads.fastq -o out.airr.tsv --organism human --seqtype nt
arda annotate -i prot.fasta  -o out.airr.tsv --organism human --seqtype aa
arda annotate -i reads.fastq -o out.airr.tsv --strand forward   # plus-strand only
arda build-db   --organism all              # rebuild references (needs IgBLAST)
arda build-index --organism all             # (re)build the precompiled mmseqs DBs
arda slurm -i big.fastq -o big.airr.tsv --shards 50 --partition cpu   # cluster scale

See examples/ for a runnable per-locus demo and benchmarks/RESULTS.md for measured speed/accuracy.

The reference database ships with precompiled MMseqs2 indexes (database/vdj/<organism>/mmseqs/), so annotation runs out of the box with no build step. They are used automatically when the local MMseqs2 version matches the shipped one; otherwise arda transparently rebuilds a private cache on first run (arda build-index regenerates the shipped DBs for your version).

Input may be FASTA or FASTQ, plain or gzipped. Nucleotide input is searched on both strands by default (reverse-complement reads are re-oriented and flagged rev_comp=T); a single search annotates a mixed bulk RNA-seq file across all loci.

Library

import arda

records = arda.annotate_sequences(
    ["GACGTGCAG...", ("clone7", "CAGGTG...")],  # strings or (id, seq) pairs
    seqtype="nt", organism="human",
)
# -> list of AIRR record dicts: v_call, d_call/d2_call, j_call, fwr1..fwr4,
#    cdr1..cdr3, *_start/*_end (1-based closed), *_aa, junction(_aa), np1/np2/np3,
#    v_sequence_end, j_sequence_start, productive, rev_comp, ...

Annotating bare germline segments

There is no coverage filter, so a V-only or J-only query maps to its scaffold and only the regions inside the query's coverage are returned. This lets you annotate isolated germline V or J alleles without synthesising a rearrangement — a bare V yields fwr1..fwr3, a bare J yields fwr4:

from arda.annotate.mapper import annotate_records

recs = annotate_records(
    [("TRBV9*01", v_germline_nt), ("TRBJ2-7*01", j_germline_nt)],
    organism="human", seqtype="nt", strand="forward", map_d=False,
)
# V record -> fwr1/cdr1/fwr2/cdr2/fwr3 (+ v_sequence_end = CDR3 start)
# J record -> fwr4 (+ j_sequence_start = CDR3 end / FR4 start)

(mirpy uses exactly this to bake per-allele FR/CDR subsequences into its gene library; see tests/synthetic/test_germline_segments.py.)

How it works

1. Reference build (arda.refbuild, offline): download IMGT/V-QUEST germlines → enumerate deduplicated in-frame V×J scaffolds (D only affects CDR3 interior, so it isn't enumerated) → annotate with igblastn -outfmt 19 → translate → write database/vdj/<organism>/{alleles.fasta, alleles.aa.fasta, markup.tsv, markup.aa.tsv, combinations.tsv, build.log}.
2. Runtime (arda.annotate): MMseqs2 search query→scaffolds → best hit → C++ transfer_regions projects scaffold region coordinates onto the query (handling indels, truncation, mid-codon alignment starts, reverse strand) → for VDJ loci a gapless C++ local alignment of the CDR3 interior against the D germlines adds d_call/d2_call + np* → AIRR TSV. Out-of-frame junctions are reported with an N-bridge (_) so FR4 still reads.

See memory/ for design rationale and gotchas. Fast sequence primitives (translate, detect_coding_frame, reverse_complement, back_translate) live in the C++ extension and are re-exported from arda.refbuild.translate — mirpy-API-compatible, so mirpy can import arda and reuse them.

Performance

Exact annotation that matches IgBLAST while being several times faster, scaling to large FASTQ. Synthetic human IGH, 16 threads (scripts/bench_vs_igblast.py):

sequences	arda	arda rate	speedup vs IgBLAST	region concordance
10,000	5.5s	~1.8k/s	4.4×	98.9%
50,000	16s	~3.0k/s	7.3×
100,000	30s	~3.3k/s	7.9×

On ~7.3k real GenBank mRNA records spanning all five organisms and their loci (committed, gzipped test fixtures), region concordance with IgBLAST on productive records is 98–99.7% per organism; junction_aa/cdr3_aa match IgBLAST ~99% and satisfy the AIRR invariants exactly. V-gene assignment agrees ~100%. (GenBank also contains genomic/partial/non-productive entries that confuse both tools; those are excluded from the comparison.)

Bulk RNA-seq is much faster than amplicon, because mmseqs prefilters by k-mer matching — reads with no receptor k-mer are rejected before alignment. At 150 nt reads, 16 threads (scripts/bench_prefilter.py):

receptor content	throughput
100% (amplicon)	~5.7k reads/s
10%	~19k reads/s
1% (blood RNA-seq)	~25k reads/s

Extrapolated to a 32-core node, a 30M-read bulk RNA-seq library (~1% receptor) annotates in roughly 10–20 min — the same order of magnitude as a STAR genome alignment pass on the same data (STAR is faster per read, but arda maps only to a tiny germline DB and the non-receptor majority costs just prefilter rejection). Large FASTQ is streamed in bounded chunks (a background reader prefetches the next chunk while the current one is annotated), so memory stays flat regardless of input size — --chunk-size tunes it.

Roadmap / TODO

See ROADMAP.md. Done: V·J reference build (5 organisms), MMseqs2 mapping, C++ markup transfer, reverse-complement, all-loci querying, streaming I/O, out-of-frame junctions, D-segment mapping incl. D-D fusions, precompiled indexes, multi-node (SLURM) sharding. Next: full AIRR productivity.

Development

pip install -e .                                  # rebuilds the C++ ext on import
python -m pytest tests/unit tests/synthetic -q    # fast suite
env ARDA_REALWORLD=1 python -m pytest tests/realworld -s   # vs IgBLAST (network)
env RUN_BENCHMARK=1   python -m pytest tests/benchmark -s  # timing/memory/scaling

Layout: src/arda/{refbuild,annotate}, C++ in src/_markup/markup.cpp, references in database/, downloads in gitignored bin/ + data/.