The adaptive immune system uses several strategies to generate a repertoire of T cell receptors (TCR) with sufficient diversity to recognize the universe of potential pathogens. However, it remains unclear how differences in the T cell receptor (TCR) contribute to heterogeneity in T cell state. In this study, we used polychromatic flow cytometry to isolate highly pure CD4+/CD8+ naive and memory T cells, and applied deep sequencing to characterize corresponding TCR β-chain (TCRβ) complementary-determining region 3 (CDR3) repertoires. We find that shorter TCRβ CDR3s with fewer insertions were highly enriched during thymic selection. Antigen-experienced T cells (memory T cells) harbor shorter CDR3s vs. naive T cells. Moreover, the public TCRβ CDR3 clonotypes within cell subsets or interindividual tend to have shorter CDR3 length and a significantly larger size compared with "private" clonotypes. Taken together, shorter CDR3s highly enriched during thymic selection and antigen-driven selection, and further enriched in public T-cell responses. These results indicated that it may be evolutionary pressures drive short CDR3s to recognize most of antigen in nature.
Pubmed ID: 30863407 RIS Download
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An open source software package aimed at extraction of information on repertoire of T-cell clones from Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data. It is designed with the knowledge of the critical challenges arising in everyday processing of immunological data.
View all literature mentionsHarvester is a Web-based tool that bulk-collects bioinformatic data on human proteins from various databases and prediction servers. It is a meta search engine for gene and protein information. It searches 16 major databases and prediction servers and combines the results on pregenerated HTML pages. In this way Harvester can provide comprehensive gene-protein information from different servers in a convenient and fast manner. As full text meta search engine, similar to Google trade mark, Harvester allows screening of the whole genome proteome for current protein functions and predictions in a few seconds. With Harvester it is now possible to compare and check the quality of different database entries and prediction algorithms on a single page. Sponsors: This work has been supported by the BMBF with grants 01GR0101 and 01KW0013.
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