Conceptual Modeling of the V Gene Annotation Process in Antibodies

The genes present in the V(D)J segments are components for the generation of antibodies. The function of antibodies is to detect foreign agents that are harmful to the organism. The location of the V, D and J genes is of great interest for the diagnosis of diseases and genomic disorders. The gene recognition or genome annotation process is of high complexity due to the integration of large volumes and diverse data sources. Genome annotation is the process of assigning information or labels to sections of the genome of a species. Advances have been made in the systematization of some steps of the annotation process, but activities that are performed manually by molecular biology specialists still prevail. Due to the diversity of rules that must be taken into account to determine the location of the V, D and J genes in the annotation process, a great amount of time and computational resources are consumed. In this work we propose the use of design science methodology for knowledge representation by means of conceptual modeling. The model represents the annotation process, the rules to determine its functionality and the parts that compose the V genes.