Detecting T cell receptors involved in immune responses from single repertoire snapshots

We present Antigen-specific Lymphocyte Identification by Clustering of Expanded sequences (ALICE), a statistical approach that identifies TCR sequences actively involved in current immune responses from a single RepSeq sample and apply it to repertoires of patients w ith a variety of disorders—patients with autoimmune disease (ankylosing spondylitis [AS]), under cancer immunotherapy, or subject to an acute infection (live yellow fever [YF] vaccine). We validate the method with independent assays. ALICE requires no longitudinal data collection nor large cohorts , and it is directly applicable to most RepSeq datasets. Its results facilitate the identification of TCR variants associated with diseases and conditions, which can be used for diagnostics and rational vaccine design.

Source: PLoS Biology: Archived Table of Contents - June 12, 2019 Category: Biology Authors: Mikhail V. Pogorelyy Source Type: research