Public T-Cell Receptors (TCRs) revisited by analysis of the magnitude of identical and highly-similar TCRs in virus-specific T-Cell repertoires of healthy individuals

Huisman, W.; Hageman, L.; Leboux, D.A.T.; Khmelevskaya, A.; Efimov, G.A.; Roex, M.C.J.; ... ; Jedema, I. (2022)

Article / Letter to editor

Since multiple different T-cell receptor (TCR) sequences can bind to the same peptide-MHC combination and the number of TCR-sequences that can theoretically be generated even exceeds the number of T cells in a human body, the likelihood that many public identical (PUB-I) TCR-sequences frequently contribute to immune responses has been estimated to be low. Here, we quantitatively analyzed the TCR-repertoires of 190 purified virus-specific memory T-cell populations, directed against 21 epitopes of Cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus and Adenovirus isolated from 29 healthy individuals, and determined the magnitude, defined as prevalence within the population and frequencies within individuals, of PUB-I TCR and of TCR-sequences that are highly-similar (PUB-HS) to these PUB-I TCR-sequences. We found that almost one third of all TCR nucleotide-sequences represented PUB-I TCR amino-acid (AA) sequences and found an additional 12% of PUB-HS TCRs differing by maximally 3 AAs. We illustrate that these PUB-I and PUB-HS TCRs were structurally related and contained shared core-sequences in their TCR-sequences. We found a prevalence of PUB-I and PUB-HS TCRs of up to 50% among individuals and showed frequencies of virus-specific PUB-I and PUB-HS TCRs making up more than 10% of each virus-specific T-cell population. These findings were confirmed by using an independent TCR-database of virus-specific TCRs. We therefore conclude that the magnitude of the contribution of PUB-I and PUB-HS TCRs to these virus-specific T-cell responses is high. Because the T cells from these virus-specific memory TCR-repertoires were the result of successful control of the virus in these healthy individuals, these PUB-HS TCRs and PUB-I TCRs may be attractive candidates for immunotherapy in immunocompromised patients that lack virus-specific T cells to control viral reactivation.

• virus-specific T cell responses
• TCR
• T cell receptor
• public T cell receptors
• computational analysis
• CDR3 amino acid motifs
• memory T cells (Tmem)
• V-D-J recombination
• TCR repertoire analysis

• All authors: Huisman, W.; Hageman, L.; Leboux, D.A.T.; Khmelevskaya, A.; Efimov, G.A.; Roex, M.C.J.; Amsen, D.; Falkenburg, J.H.F.; Jedema, I.
• Date: 2022-03-24
• Journal: Frontiers in Immunology
• Volume: 13
• DOI: doi:10.3389/fimmu.2022.851868