Biologically-informed Killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptor (KIR) gene annotation tool.

A recent preprint abstract discusses the challenges of accurately genotyping Killer cell Immunoglobulin-like Receptors (KIRs), which play a crucial role in regulating the activity of natural killer (NK) cells in the immune system. The complexity and variability of KIR genes make traditional genotyping methods unreliable, hindering immunogenetic research. To address this issue, researchers have developed a computational tool called BAKIR (Biologically-informed Annotator for KIR locus) that improves the accuracy of KIR gene annotations by identifying key functional mutations. BAKIR has been evaluated on a subset of genome assemblies and has shown promising results in improving annotations and identifying novel variants. The tool is freely available on GitHub and offers a user-friendly command-line interface, making it accessible to the scientific community. [Extracted from the article]