T cell receptor repertoires of mice and humans are clustered in similarity networks around conserved public CDR3 sequences
- Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
- Weizmann Institute, Israel
- National Cancer Institute, United States
- National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, United States
Abstract
Diversity of T cell receptor (TCR) repertoires, generated by somatic DNA rearrangements, is central to immune system function. However, the level of sequence similarity of TCR repertoires within and between species has not been characterized. Using network analysis of high-throughput TCR sequencing data, we found that abundant CDR3-TCRβ sequences were clustered within networks generated by sequence similarity. We discovered a substantial number of public CDR3-TCRβ segments that were identical in mice and humans. These conserved public sequences were central within TCR sequence-similarity networks. Annotated TCR sequences, previously associated with self-specificities such as autoimmunity and cancer, were linked to network clusters. Mechanistically, CDR3 networks were promoted by MHC-mediated selection, and were reduced following immunization, immune checkpoint blockade or aging. Our findings provide a new view of T cell repertoire organization and physiology, and suggest that the immune system distributes its TCR sequences unevenly, attending to specific foci of reactivity.
Data availability
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Young mice TCR repertoirePublicly available at NCBI Sequence Read Archive (accession no: SRP042610).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Minerva Foundation
- Nir Friedman
Federal German Ministry for Education and Research
- Nir Friedman
I-CORE
- Nir Friedman
Israel Science Foundation
- Nir Friedman
M.D. Moross Institute for Cancer Reseach
- Asaf Madi
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#24110116-2) of the Weizmann Institute of Science. The protocol was approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2017, Madi et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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T cell receptor repertoires of mice and humans are clustered in similarity networks around conserved public CDR3 sequences
eLife 6:e22057.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.22057
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Enhancers and promoters are classically considered to be bound by a small set of transcription factors (TFs) in a sequence-specific manner. This assumption has come under increasing skepticism as the datasets of ChIP-seq assays of TFs have expanded. In particular, high-occupancy target (HOT) loci attract hundreds of TFs with often no detectable correlation between ChIP-seq peaks and DNA-binding motif presence. Here, we used a set of 1003 TF ChIP-seq datasets (HepG2, K562, H1) to analyze the patterns of ChIP-seq peak co-occurrence in combination with functional genomics datasets. We identified 43,891 HOT loci forming at the promoter (53%) and enhancer (47%) regions. HOT promoters regulate housekeeping genes, whereas HOT enhancers are involved in tissue-specific process regulation. HOT loci form the foundation of human super-enhancers and evolve under strong negative selection, with some of these loci being located in ultraconserved regions. Sequence-based classification analysis of HOT loci suggested that their formation is driven by the sequence features, and the density of mapped ChIP-seq peaks across TF-bound loci correlates with sequence features and the expression level of flanking genes. Based on the affinities to bind to promoters and enhancers we detected five distinct clusters of TFs that form the core of the HOT loci. We report an abundance of HOT loci in the human genome and a commitment of 51% of all TF ChIP-seq binding events to HOT locus formation thus challenging the classical model of enhancer activity and propose a model of HOT locus formation based on the existence of large transcriptional condensates.
