Detection and quantitation of sample contamination in immune repertoire analysis

摘要

The invention is directed to methods for detecting and quantifying nucleic acid contamination in a tissue sample of an individual containing T cells and/or B cells, which is used for generating a sequence-based clonotype profile. In one aspect, the invention is implemented by measuring the presence and/or level of an endogenous or exogenous nucleic acid tag by which nucleic acid from an intended individual can be distinguished from that of unintended individuals. Endogenous tags include genetic identity markers, such as short tandem repeats, rare clonotypes or the like, and exogenous tags include sequence tags employed to determine clonotype sequences from sequence reads.