Tracking global changes induced in the CD4 T-cell receptor repertoire by immunization with a complex antigen using short stretches of CDR3 protein sequence

Niclas Thomas, Katharine Best, Mattia Cinelli, Shlomit Reich-Zeliger, Hilah Gal, Eric Shifrut, Asaf Madi, Nir Friedman, John Shawe-Taylor, Benny Chain*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

74 Scopus citations

Abstract

Motivation: The clonal theory of adaptive immunity proposes that immunological responses are encoded by increases in the frequency of lymphocytes carrying antigen-specific receptors. In this study, we measure the frequency of different T-cell receptors (TcR) in CD4 + T cell populations of mice immunized with a complex antigen, killed Mycobacterium tuberculosis, using high throughput parallel sequencing of the TcRβ chain. Our initial hypothesis that immunization would induce repertoire convergence proved to be incorrect, and therefore an alternative approach was developed that allows accurate stratification of TcR repertoires and provides novel insights into the nature of CD4 + T-cell receptor recognition.

Results: To track the changes induced by immunization within this heterogeneous repertoire, the sequence data were classified by counting the frequency of different clusters of short (3 or 4) continuous stretches of amino acids within the antigen binding complementarity determining region 3 (CDR3) repertoire of different mice. Both unsupervised (hierarchical clustering) and supervised (support vector machine) analyses of these different distributions of sequence clusters differentiated between immunized and unimmunized mice with 100% efficiency. The CD4 + TcR repertoires of mice 5 and 14 days postimmunization were clearly different from that of unimmunized mice but were not distinguishable from each other. However, the repertoires of mice 60 days postimmunization were distinct both from naive mice and the day 5/14 animals. Our results reinforce the remarkable diversity of the TcR repertoire, resulting in many diverse private TcRs contributing to the T-cell response even in genetically identical mice responding to the same antigen. However, specific motifs defined by short stretches of amino acids within the CDR3 region may determine TcR specificity and define a new approach to TcR sequence classification.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3181-3188
Number of pages8
JournalBioinformatics
Volume30
Issue number22
DOIs
StatePublished - 27 Feb 2014
Externally publishedYes

Funding

FundersFunder number
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Microsoft Research
Medical Research CouncilMR/K006584/1
Medical Research Council

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