5 research outputs found
Precise tracking of vaccine-responding T-cell clones reveals convergent and personalized response in identical twins
T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire data contain information about infections
that could be used in disease diagnostics and vaccine development, but
extracting that information remains a major challenge. Here we developed a
statistical framework to detect TCR clone proliferation and contraction from
longitudinal repertoire data. We applied this framework to data from three
pairs of identical twins immunized with the yellow fever vaccine. We identified
500-1500 responding TCRs in each donor and validated them using three
independent assays. While the responding TCRs were mostly private, albeit with
higher overlap between twins, they could be well predicted using a classifier
based on sequence similarity. Our method can also be applied to samples
obtained post-infection, making it suitable for systematic discovery of new
infection-specific TCRs in the clinic