2023/07/25 by Giulio Isacchini, Valentin Quiniou, Isacchini, Giulio +15
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Immunology and Microbiology · #FOS: Biological sciences #Immune Cell Function and Interaction #Molecular Networks (q-bio.MN) #Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM) #T-cell and B-cell Immunology #vaccines and immunoinformatics approaches
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2307.14376
openalex publication_date 2023/07/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The adaptive immune response relies on T cells that combine phenotypic specialization with diversity of T cell receptors (TCRs) to recognize a wide range of pathogens. TCRs are acquired and selected during T cell maturation in the thymus. Characterizing TCR repertoires across individuals and T cell maturation stages is important for better understanding adaptive immune responses and for developing new diagnostics and therapies. Analyzing a dataset of human TCR repertoires from thymocyte subsets, we find that the variability between individuals generated during the TCR V(D)J recombination is maintained through all stages of T cell maturation and differentiation. The inter-individual variability of repertoires of the same cell type is of comparable magnitude to the variability across cell types within the same individual. To zoom in on smaller scales than whole repertoires, we defined a distance measuring the relative overlap of locally similar sequences in repertoires. We find that the whole repertoire models correctly predict local similarity networks, suggesting a lack of forbidden T cell receptor sequences. The local measure correlates well with distances calculated using whole repertoire traits and carries information about cell types.