High-throughput sequencing has the power to reveal the nature of adaptive immunity as represented by the full complexity of T cell receptor (TCR) and antibody (IG) repertoires, but is at present severely compromised by the quantitative bias, bottlenecks, and accumulated errors that inevitably occur in the course of library preparation and sequencing. Here we report an optimized protocol for the unbiased preparation of TCR and IG cDNA libraries for high-throughput sequencing, starting from thousands or millions of live cells in an investigated sample. Critical points to control are revealed, along with tips that allow researchers to minimize quantitative bias, accumulated errors, and cross-sample contamination at each stage, and to enhance the subsequent bioinformatic analysis. The protocol is simple, reliable, and can be performed in 1–2 days.

Autoimmunity is intrinsically driven by memory T and B cell clones inappropriately targeted at self-antigens. Selective depletion or suppression of self-reactive T cells remains a holy grail of autoimmune therapy, but disease-associated T cell receptors (TCRs) and cognate antigenic epitopes remained elusive. A TRBV9-containing CD8⁺ TCR motif was recently associated with the pathogenesis of ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis and acute anterior uveitis, and cognate HLA-B*27-presented epitopes were identified. Following successful testing in nonhuman primate models, here we report human TRBV9⁺ T cell elimination in ankylosing spondylitis. The patient achieved remission within 3 months and ceased anti-TNF therapy after 5 years of continuous use. Complete remission has now persisted for 4 years, with three doses of anti-TRBV9 administered per year. We also observed a profound improvement in spinal mobility metrics and the Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Metrology Index (BASMI). This represents a possibly curative therapy of an autoimmune disease via selective depletion of a TRBV-defined group of T cells. The anti-TRBV9 therapy could potentially be applicable to other HLA-B*27-associated spondyloarthropathies. Such targeted elimination of the underlying cause of the disease without systemic immunosuppression could offer a new generation of safe and efficient therapies for autoimmunity.

T cell maturation and activation depend upon T cell receptor (TCR) interactions with a wide variety of antigenic peptides displayed in a given major histocompatibility complex (MHC) context. Complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) is the most variable part of the TCRα and -β chains, which govern interactions with peptide–MHC complexes. However, it remains unclear how the CDR3 landscape is shaped by individual MHC context during thymic selection of naïve T cells. We established two mouse strains carrying distinct allelic variants ofH2-Aand analyzed thymic and peripheral production and TCR repertoires of naïve conventional CD4⁺T (T_conv) and naïve regulatory CD4⁺T (T_reg) cells. Compared with tuberculosis-resistant C57BL/6 (H2-A^b) mice, the tuberculosis-susceptible H2-A^jmice had fewer CD4⁺T cells of both subsets in the thymus. In the periphery, this deficiency was only apparent for T_convand was compensated for by peripheral reconstitution for T_reg. We show that H2-A^jfavors selection of a narrower and more convergent repertoire with more hydrophobic and strongly interacting amino acid residues in the middle of CDR3α and CDR3β, suggesting more stringent selection against a narrower peptide–MHC-II context. H2-A^jand H2-A^bmice have prominent reciprocal differences in CDR3α and CDR3β features, probably reflecting distinct modes of TCR fitting to MHC-II variants. These data reveal the mechanics and extent of how MHC-II shapes the naïve CD4⁺T cell CDR3 landscape, which essentially defines adaptive response to infections and self-antigens.

The relationship between maternal and child immunity has been actively studied in the context of complications during pregnancy, autoimmune diseases, and haploidentical transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) and solid organs. Here, we have for the first time used high-throughput Illumina HiSeq sequencing to perform deep quantitative profiling of T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoires for peripheral blood samples of three mothers and their six children. Advanced technology allowed accurate identification of 5х105–2х106 TCR beta clonotypes per individual. We performed comparative analysis of these TCR repertoires with the aim of revealing characteristic features that distinguish related mother-child pairs, such as relative TRBV segment usage frequency and relative overlap of TCR beta CDR3 repertoires. We show that thymic selection essentially and similarly shapes the initial output of the TCR recombination machinery in both related and unrelated pairs, with minor effect from inherited differences. The achieved depth of TCR profiling also allowed us to test the hypothesis that mature T cells transferred across the placenta during pregnancy can expand and persist as functional microchimeric clones in their new host, using characteristic TCR beta CDR3 variants as clonal identifiers.