scholarly journals T-cell receptor αβ chain pairing is associated with CD4+ and CD8+ lineage specification

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason A. Carter ◽  
Jonathan B. Preall ◽  
Kristina Grigaityte ◽  
Stephen J. Goldfless ◽  
Adrian W. Briggs ◽  
...  

AbstractWhile a highly diverse T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire is the hallmark of a healthy adaptive immune system, relatively little is understood about how the CD4+ and CD8+ TCR repertoires differ from one another. We here utilize high-throughput single T-cell sequencing to obtain approximately 100,000 TCR αβ chain pairs from human subjects, stratified into CD4+ and CD8+ lineages. We reveal that substantial information about T-cell lineage is encoded by Vαβ gene pairs and, to a lesser extent, by several other TCR features such as CDR3 length and charge. We further find that the strength of association between the β chain and T-cell lineage is surprisingly weak, similar in strength to that of the α chain. Using machine learning classifiers to predict T-cell lineage from TCR features, we demon-strate that αβ chain pairs are significantly more informative than individual chains alone. These findings provide unprecedented insight into the CD4+ and CD8+ TCR repertoires and highlight the importance of αβ chain pairing in TCR function and specificity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hussein A. Abbas ◽  
Patrick K. Reville ◽  
Xianli Jiang ◽  
Hui Yang ◽  
Alexandre Reuben ◽  
...  

Aberrant T-cell function is implicated in the pathogenesis of myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). Monitoring the T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire can provide insights into T-cell adaptive immunity. Previous studies found skewed TCR repertoires in MDS compared to healthy patients; however these studies that leverage mRNA-based spectratyping have limitations. Furthermore, evaluating the TCR repertoire in context of hypomethylating agents (HMAs) treatment can provide insights into the dynamics of T-cell mediated responses in MDS. We conducted immunosequencing of the CDR3 regions of TCRβ chains in bone marrows of 11 MDS patients prior to treatment (n=11 bone marrows prior to treatment), and in at least 2 timepoints for each patient following treatment (n=26 bone marrow aspirates post-treatment) with (HMA), alongside analyzing bone marrows from 4 healthy donors as controls. TCR repertoires in MDS patients were more clonal and less diverse than healthy donors. However, unlike previous reports, we did not observe significant skewness in CDR3 length or spectratyping. The global metrics of TCR profiling including richness, clonality, overlaps were not significantly changed in responders or non-responders following treatment with HMAs. However, we found an emergence of novel clonotypes in MDS patients who responded to treatment, while non-responders had a higher frequency of contracted clonotypes following treatment. By applying GLIPH2 for antigen prediction, we found rare TCR specificity clusters shared by TCR clonotypes from different patients at pre- or following treatment. Our data show clear differences in TCR repertoires of MDS compared with healthy patients and that novel TCR clonotype emergence in response to HMA therapy was correlated with response. This suggests that response to HMA therapy may be partially driven by T-cell mediated immunity and that the immune-based therapies, which target the adaptive immune system, may play a significant role in select patients with MDS.



2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Chronister ◽  
Austin Crinklaw ◽  
Swapnil Mahajan ◽  
Randi Vita ◽  
Zeynep Koşaloğlu-Yalçın ◽  
...  

The adaptive immune system in vertebrates has evolved to recognize non-self antigens, such as proteins expressed by infectious agents and mutated cancer cells. T cells play an important role in antigen recognition by expressing a diverse repertoire of antigen-specific receptors, which bind epitopes to mount targeted immune responses. Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing have enabled the routine generation of T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire data. Identifying the specific epitopes targeted by different TCRs in these data would be valuable. To accomplish that, we took advantage of the ever-increasing number of TCRs with known epitope specificity curated in the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) since 2004. We compared seven metrics of sequence similarity to determine their power to predict if two TCRs have the same epitope specificity. We found that a comprehensive k-mer matching approach produced the best results, which we have implemented into TCRMatch, an openly accessible tool (http://tools.iedb.org/tcrmatch/) that takes TCR β-chain CDR3 sequences as an input, identifies TCRs with a match in the IEDB, and reports the specificity of each match. We anticipate that this tool will provide new insights into T cell responses captured in receptor repertoire and single cell sequencing experiments and will facilitate the development of new strategies for monitoring and treatment of infectious, allergic, and autoimmune diseases, as well as cancer.



2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D Chronister ◽  
Austin Crinklaw ◽  
Swapnil Mahajan ◽  
Randi Vita ◽  
Zeynep Kosaloglu-Yalcin ◽  
...  

The adaptive immune system in vertebrates has evolved to recognize non-self-antigens, such as proteins expressed by infectious agents and mutated cancer cells. T cells play an important role in antigen recognition by expressing a diverse repertoire of antigen-specific receptors, which bind epitopes to mount targeted immune responses. Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing have enabled the routine generation of T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire data. Identifying the specific epitopes targeted by different TCRs in these data would be valuable. To accomplish that, we took advantage of the ever-increasing number of TCRs with known epitope specificity curated in the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) since 2004. We compared six metrics of sequence similarity to determine their power to predict if two TCRs have the same epitope specificity. We found that a comprehensive k-mer matching approach produced the best results, which we have implemented into TCRMatch, an openly accessible tool (http://tools.iedb.org/tcrmatch/) that takes TCR β-chain CDR3 sequences as an input, identifies TCRs with a match in the IEDB, and reports the specificity of each match. We anticipate that this tool will provide new insights into T cell responses captured in receptor repertoire and single cell sequencing experiments and will facilitate the development of new strategies for monitoring and treatment of infectious, allergic, and autoimmune diseases, as well as cancer.





2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (20) ◽  
pp. eabf5835
Author(s):  
Wen Zhang ◽  
Peter G. Hawkins ◽  
Jing He ◽  
Namita T. Gupta ◽  
Jinrui Liu ◽  
...  

T cell receptor (TCR) antigen–specific recognition is essential for the adaptive immune system. However, building a TCR-antigen interaction map has been challenging due to the staggering diversity of TCRs and antigens. Accordingly, highly multiplexed dextramer-TCR binding assays have been recently developed, but the utility of the ensuing large datasets is limited by the lack of robust computational methods for normalization and interpretation. Here, we present a computational framework comprising a novel method, ICON (Integrative COntext-specific Normalization), for identifying reliable TCR-pMHC (peptide–major histocompatibility complex) interactions and a neural network–based classifier TCRAI that outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for TCR-antigen specificity prediction. We further demonstrated that by combining ICON and TCRAI, we are able to discover novel subgroups of TCRs that bind to a given pMHC via different mechanisms. Our framework facilitates the identification and understanding of TCR-antigen–specific interactions for basic immunological research and clinical immune monitoring.



2022 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Kroopa Joshi ◽  
Martina Milighetti ◽  
Benjamin M Chain


1999 ◽  
Vol 190 (11) ◽  
pp. 1617-1626 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomokatsu Ikawa ◽  
Hiroshi Kawamoto ◽  
Shinji Fujimoto ◽  
Yoshimoto Katsura

We have established a new clonal assay system that can evenly support the development of T and natural killer (NK) cells. With this system, we show that all T cell progenitors in the earliest CD44+CD25−FcγRII/III− fetal thymus (FT) cell population retain NK potential, and that the NK lineage–committed progenitors (p-NK) also exist in this population. T cell lineage–committed progenitors (p-T), which are unable to generate NK cells, first appear at the CD44+CD25− FcγRII/III+ stage in day 12 FT. The proportion of p-T markedly increases during the transition from the CD44+CD25− stage to the CD44+CD25+ stage in day 14 FT. On the other hand, p-NK preferentially increase in number at the CD44+CD25− stage between days 12 and 14 of gestation. The production of p-NK continues up to the CD44+CD25+ stage, but ceases before the rearrangement of T cell receptor β chain genes. It was further shown that the CD44+CD25− CD122+ population of day 14 FT exclusively contains p-NK. These results indicate that the earliest T cell progenitor migrating into the FT is T/NK bipotent, and strongly suggest that the bipotent progenitor continuously produces p-NK and p-T until the CD44+CD25+ stage.



2017 ◽  
Vol 214 (11) ◽  
pp. 3417-3433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaojing Chen ◽  
Lucia Poncette ◽  
Thomas Blankenstein

For thymic selection and responses to pathogens, T cells interact through their αβ T cell receptor (TCR) with peptide–major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules on antigen-presenting cells. How the diverse TCRs interact with a multitude of MHC molecules is unresolved. It is also unclear how humans generate larger TCR repertoires than mice do. We compared the TCR repertoire of CD4 T cells selected from a single mouse or human MHC class II (MHC II) in mice containing the human TCR gene loci. Human MHC II yielded greater thymic output and a more diverse TCR repertoire. The complementarity determining region 3 (CDR3) length adjusted for different inherent V-segment affinities to MHC II. Humans evolved with greater nontemplate-encoded CDR3 diversity than did mice. Our data, which demonstrate human TCR–MHC coevolution after divergence from rodents, explain the greater T cell diversity in humans and suggest a mechanism for ensuring that any V–J gene combination can be selected by a single MHC II.



2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjit Fernandes ◽  
Surendra Chavan ◽  
Vivek Chitnis ◽  
Nina Kohn ◽  
Savita Pahwa

ABSTRACTRationale: evaluation of the T-cell receptor (TCR) Vβ-chain repertoire by PCR-based CDR3 length analysis allows fine resolution of the usage of the TCR Vβ repertoire and is a sensitive tool to monitor changes in the T-cell compartment. A multiplex PCR method employing 24 labeled upstream Vβ primers instead of the conventionally labeled downstream Cβ primer is described. Method: RNA was isolated from purified CD4 and CD8 T-cell subsets from umbilical cord blood and clinical samples using TRI reagent followed by reverse transcription using a Cβ primer and an Omniscript RT kit. The 24 Vβ primers were multiplexed based on compatibility and product sizes into seven reactions. cDNA was amplified using 24 Vβ primers (labeled with tetrachloro-6-cardoxyfluorescein, 6-carboxyfluorescein, and hexachloro-6-carboxyfluorescein), an unlabeled Cβ primer, and Taqgold polymerase. The fluorescent PCR products were resolved on an automated DNA sequencer and analyzed using the Genotyper 2.1 software. Results: Vβ spectratypes of excellent resolution were obtained with RNA amounts of 250 ng using the labeled Vβ primers. The resolution was superior to that obtained with the labeled Cβ primer assay. Also the numbers of PCRs were reduced to 7 from the 12 required in the Cβ labeling method, and the sample processing time was reduced by half. Conclusion: The method described for T-cell receptor Vβ-chain repertoire analysis eliminates tedious dilutions and results in superior resolution with small amounts of RNA. The fast throughput makes this method suitable for automation and offers the feasibility to perform TCR Vβ repertoire analyses in clinical trials.



2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Ceglia ◽  
Erin J. Kelley ◽  
Annalee S. Boyle ◽  
Sandra Zurawski ◽  
Heather L. Mead ◽  
...  

Common approaches for monitoring T cell responses are limited in their multiplexity and sensitivity. In contrast, deep sequencing of the T Cell Receptor (TCR) repertoire provides a global view that is limited only in terms of theoretical sensitivity due to the depth of available sampling; however, the assignment of antigen specificities within TCR repertoires has become a bottleneck. This study combines antigen-driven expansion, deep TCR sequencing, and a novel analysis framework to show that homologous ‘Clusters of Expanded TCRs (CETs)’ can be confidently identified without cell isolation, and assigned to antigen against a background of non-specific clones. We show that clonotypes within each CET respond to the same epitope, and that protein antigens stimulate multiple CETs reactive to constituent peptides. Finally, we demonstrate the personalized assignment of antigen-specificity to rare clones within fully-diverse uncultured repertoires. The method presented here may be used to monitor T cell responses to vaccination and immunotherapy with high fidelity.



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