Genomics and Epigenomics of the Elderly Response to Pneumococcal Vaccines

This is a study designed to develop a detailed transcriptional and cellular profile of the immune response to pneumococcal vaccination with conjugated and non-conjugated polysaccharide vaccines in the senescent immune system of older adults.

In this study, 39 healthy adults ages 60 and older that have never received pneumococcal vaccination, have been randomized to receive Prevnar 13 (Pfizer), a conjugated 13-valent vaccine or Pneumovax 23 (Merck), a non-conjugated 23-valent vaccine. Four (4) study visits occurred over 70 days at Day -7 (baseline), day 1, day 10 and day 60 (± 5d) post vaccination.Bulk RNA-sequencing data are available on the 4 time points for 31 of the participants and 1 replicate.

We generated single nucleus ATAC-seq (snATAC-seq) data from PBMCs of 2 baseline blood samples from the pneumococcal study. Generated data was then used to benchmark a novel computational method for detecting multiplets in snATAC-seq data, namely, AMULET (https://github.com/UcarLab/AMULET). Multiplets confound downstream analyses by introducing combined epigenomic profiles from 2 or more cells/nuclei. AMULET detects multiplets by using unique snATAC-seq data features that allow it to reliably use read counts to detect multiplets for their removal from data analyses.