Sources & citations

AIRBabel aggregates and attributes source records; it does not adjudicate nomenclature. Every allele here comes from one or more of the sources below. This page lists each source's version, licence and citation, so the dataset can be rebuilt from the primary sources.

The underlying sequences are submitted by original authors to public repositories such as GenBank. Each allele page links accession records when they are available. Curator databases contribute curation: nomenclature, evidence, functionality calls, and reference-set membership. Credit them for that. If you use sequences from AIRBabel, cite the original source of each sequence you use. The contributing source(s) and accession are listed on every allele page.

IMGT/GENE-DB

external 15,182 alleles named

The international ImMunoGeneTics information system reference directory of IG/TR genes and alleles, across species.

Releases: 53 ingested
CURIE: IMGT/GENE-DB:
Licence: CC BY 4.0
Cite: IMGT®, the international ImMunoGeneTics information system®, https://www.imgt.org (founder and director: Marie-Paule Lefranc, Montpellier, France).
Site: https://www.imgt.org/genedb/

MUSA

internal 3,777 alleles named

Internal curated rhesus macaque set (Yaari Lab) aggregating KIMDB, RhGLDB+, VRC and Guo et al., each credited as a first-class source.

CURIE: MUSA:
Licence: Released with the publication; redistribution permitted with attribution
Cite: Peres A, Upadhyay AA, Klein V, Saha S, Rodriguez OL, Vanwinkle ZM, et al. Population-level genomic analysis of immunoglobulin loci variation in rhesus macaques reveals extensive germline diversity. Immunity. 2026;59(1):213-228.e6.
10.1016/j.immuni.2025.12.002
Site: https://vdjbase.org/reference_book/Rhesus_Macaque

OGRDB

external 3,033 alleles named

The AIRR Community's Open Germline Receptor Database of curated, evidence-backed inferred germline sets.

CURIE: OGRDB:
Licence: CC BY 4.0
Cite: Lees W, Busse CE, Corcoran M, Ohlin M, Scheepers C, Matsen FA, et al. OGRDB: a reference database of inferred immune receptor genes. Nucleic Acids Research. 2020;48(D1):D964-D970.
10.1093/nar/gkz822
Site: https://ogrdb.airr-community.org

NCBI Nucleotide (GenBank)

external 2,749 alleles named

Primary public accession records for submitted nucleotide sequences. AIRBabel uses GenBank as a cross-reference layer, not as a contributed curated germline set.

CURIE: GENBANK:
Licence: Public domain (NCBI)
Cite: Sayers EW, Cavanaugh M, Frisse L, Pruitt KD, Schneider VA, Underwood BA, Yankie L, Karsch-Mizrachi I. GenBank 2025 update. Nucleic Acids Research. 2025;53(D1):D56-D61.
10.1093/nar/gkae1114
Site: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/

RhGLDB+

external 844 alleles named

Rhesus macaque germline database (extended), built on the germline gene set annotated from multiple de novo rhesus genome assemblies. Aggregated into MUSA.

CURIE: RHGLDB:
Licence: none declared; represented on the basis of its publication, with attribution
Cite: Ramesh A, Darko S, Hua A, Overman G, Ransier A, Francica JR, et al. Structure and Diversity of the Rhesus Macaque Immunoglobulin Loci through Multiple De Novo Genome Assemblies. Frontiers in Immunology. 2017;8:1407.
10.3389/fimmu.2017.01407

KIMDB

external 833 alleles named

Macaque immunoglobulin heavy-chain germline VDJ alleles inferred with IgDiscover from 45 rhesus and cynomolgus macaques. Aggregated into MUSA.

CURIE: KIMDB:
Licence: none declared; represented on the basis of its publication, with attribution
Cite: Vázquez Bernat N, Corcoran M, Nowak I, Kaduk M, Castro Dopico X, Narang S, et al. Rhesus and cynomolgus macaque immunoglobulin heavy-chain genotyping yields comprehensive databases of germline VDJ alleles. Immunity. 2021;54(2):355-366.e4.
10.1016/j.immuni.2020.12.018
Site: http://kimdb.gkhlab.se/

KIARVA

external 633 alleles named

The Karolinska Institutet Adaptive Immune Receptor Gene Variant Atlas: an open-access atlas of human IG gene variation, built from ultra-high-throughput IGH genotyping of 25 global populations.

CURIE: KIARVA:
Licence: none declared; represented on the basis of its publication, with attribution
Cite: Corcoran M, Narang S, Kaduk M, Chernyshev M, Färnert A, Sundling C, Karlsson Hedestam GB. Ultra-high-throughput IGH genotyping of 25 global populations reveals population-biased allelic diversity and homozygous V and D gene deletions. Immunity. 2026;59(4):1107-1122.e5.
10.1016/j.immuni.2026.01.026

VRC

external 300 alleles named

Rhesus macaque germline allele set from the NIH Vaccine Research Center, inferred with IgDiscover from IgM transcripts of four Indian rhesus macaques. Aggregated into MUSA.

CURIE: VRC:
Licence: none declared; represented on the basis of its publication, with attribution
Cite: Kong R, Duan H, Sheng Z, Xu K, Acharya P, Chen X, et al. Antibody lineages with vaccine-induced antigen-binding hotspots develop broad HIV neutralization. Cell. 2019;178(3):567-584.e19.
10.1016/j.cell.2019.06.030

Guo et al.

external 197 alleles named

Rhesus macaque immunoglobulin germline alleles identified by three independent sequencing approaches (gDNA TOPO, gDNA MiSeq, IgDiscover). Aggregated into MUSA.

CURIE: GUO:
Licence: CC BY 4.0
Cite: Guo Y, Waltari E, Lu H, Sheng Z, Wu X. Novel rhesus macaque immunoglobulin germline genes identified by three sequencing approaches. Frontiers in Immunology. 2024;15:1506348.
10.3389/fimmu.2024.1506348

Literature (full-text & supplement mining)

derived 0 alleles named

Allele evidence mined from PMC Open-Access article bodies and supplementary files; a sequence hash-match is real evidence, a name match is a lead.

CURIE: PMID:
Licence: none declared; represented on the basis of its publication, with attribution
Cite: no citation available
A layer we compute, not a source anyone published. Credit belongs to the mined articles and to Europe PMC / PMC-OA as the delivery service.
Site: https://europepmc.org

This release

stamped 2026-09-10 18:34 UTC

A release records two independently varying components, because a served identity score depends on both: the data loaded, and the distance computation used to score it. Each is digested, so two deployments can be compared by one string rather than by counting rows.

Release: 2026.09.10
Content: 4731de17f5f59fee473b094600c6ac6b2c19aee7bb0e3706f79b1c19e690c665
Distance: 2290e5b233c0b5abafa5ca20226cced70310d57e34b62eaa297b2c59dd280b5b
Metric: levenshtein normalized similarity, normalised to 0–1 over the ungapped sequences. D alleles are compared only at identical length and scored positionally (hamming normalized similarity). Alleles are never compared across segments. How identity is computed →
Thresholds: Neighbour cache floor 0.75 same-species, 0.85 cross-species; per-side cap 1200. Precomputed cache present (6,864,034 edges).
Digested: 34,617 sequences · 124,661 names · 40 species
Software: allele-server 0.1.0
JSON: /version

Attribution

Data aggregated by AIRBabel from Guo et al. (CC BY 4.0), IMGT/GENE-DB (CC BY 4.0), KI-TCR, KIARVA, KIMDB, MUSA (Released with the publication; redistribution permitted with attribution), OGRDB (CC BY 4.0), RhGLDB+, VRC. Attribute the originating sources when reusing this data; see /sources for each one's citation.

Acknowledgements

Historical IMGT/GENE-DB releases were obtained from Jamie Heather's genedb-releases archive, which recovered pre-2022 releases through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and has snapshotted GENE-DB weekly since 2023. Every historical release this database holds came from there; the former-name and record-revision history would not exist without it. The sequence data is IMGT's and is attributed to IMGT above.

Rebuild this dataset

The full dataset is served through public REST API endpoints. See the API reference.

Manifest: /api/export
Records: /api/export/alleles.json
FASTA: /api/export/alleles.fasta