Digital Post-Fashion: Transformation of Design Paradigm and Metamorphoses of Identity Practices

In this digital age almost all cultural practices are experiencing changes; neither the fashion industry, nor the fashion itself as a form of social behaviour are exceptions. Fashion brands face the challenge of creating new discourses as fashion consumers are becoming more sophisticated and more individualistic at the same time, with their knowledge and imagination helping them to make conscious choices. This, in turn, affects fashion advertising and communication strategies: advertising campaigns use new discursive and narrative practices. A new emerging and developing design paradigm creates a ”post-fashion.” The phenomenon of post-fashion is associated with a deep focus on the consumers, and not so much on their needs, but on their fantasies and desires. Fashion becomes a social laboratory, helping us to decipher the mechanisms of identity building and more to understand more clearly current and future social changes. Remaining a creative industry, fashion enters the virtual space, setting new coordinates for the social imaginary of body, age and gender: that is, for all those identity parameters that are becoming increasingly vague today. This process exposes a new social imaginary, new imaginative structures and experiences. Post-fashion combines traditional elements (textiles, folk crafts and eco-production, as well as silhouette and form, and much more) with the new digital technologies in the creation and distribution of fashion products. Keywords: fashion, digital age, digitalization, new technologies, tradition, innovation, social imaginary, social imaginatio

Exploring the pre-immune landscape of antigen-specific T cells

Abstract Background Adaptive immune responses to newly encountered pathogens depend on the mobilization of antigen-specific clonotypes from a vastly diverse pool of naive T cells. Using recent advances in immune repertoire sequencing technologies, models of the immune receptor rearrangement process, and a database of annotated T cell receptor (TCR) sequences with known specificities, we explored the baseline frequencies of T cells specific for defined human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I-restricted epitopes in healthy individuals. Methods We used a database of TCR sequences with known antigen specificities and a probabilistic TCR rearrangement model to estimate the baseline frequencies of TCRs specific to distinct antigens epitopespecificT-cells. We verified our estimates using a publicly available collection of TCR repertoires from healthy individuals. We also interrogated a database of immunogenic and non-immunogenic peptides is used to link baseline T-cell frequencies with epitope immunogenicity. Results Our findings revealed a high degree of variability in the prevalence of T cells specific for different antigens that could be explained by the physicochemical properties of the corresponding HLA class I-bound peptides. The occurrence of certain rearrangements was influenced by ancestry and HLA class I restriction, and umbilical cord blood samples contained higher frequencies of common pathogen-specific TCRs. We also identified a quantitative link between specific T cell frequencies and the immunogenicity of cognate epitopes presented by defined HLA class I molecules. Conclusions Our results suggest that the population frequencies of specific T cells are strikingly non-uniform across epitopes that are known to elicit immune responses. This inference leads to a new definition of epitope immunogenicity based on specific TCR frequencies, which can be estimated with a high degree of accuracy in silico, thereby providing a novel framework to integrate computational and experimental genomics with basic and translational research efforts in the field of T cell immunology

VDJdb: a curated database of T-cell receptor sequences with known antigen specificity

The ability to decode antigen specificities encapsulated in the sequences of rearranged T-cell receptor (TCR) genes is critical for our understanding of the adaptive immune system and promises significant advances in the field of translational medicine. Recent developments in high-throughput sequencing methods (immune repertoire sequencing technology, or RepSeq) and single-cell RNA sequencing technology have allowed us to obtain huge numbers of TCR sequences from donor samples and link them to T-cell phenotypes. However, our ability to annotate these TCR sequences still lags behind, owing to the enormous diversity of the TCR repertoire and the scarcity of available data on T-cell specificities. In this paper, we present VDJdb, a database that stores and aggregates the results of published T-cell specificity assays and provides a universal platform that couples antigen specificities with TCR sequences. We demonstrate that VDJdb is a versatile instrument for the annotation of TCR repertoire data, enabling a concatenated view of antigen-specific TCR sequence motifs. VDJdb can be accessed at https://vdjdb.cdr3.net and https://github.com/antigenomics/vdjdb-db