Abstract
T cell receptors (TCRs) can recognize various pathogens and consequently start immune responses. TCRs can be sequenced from individuals and methods that can analyze the specificity of the TCRs can help us better understand the individual's immune status in different diseases. We have developed TCRGP, a novel Gaussian process (GP) method that can predict if TCRs recognize certain epitopes. This method can utilize different CDR sequences from both TCRα and TCRβ chains from single-cell data and learn which CDRs are important in recognizing the different epitopes. We have experimented with one previously presented and one new data set and show that TCRGP outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in predicting the epitope specificity of TCRs on both data sets. The software implementation and data sets are available at https://github.com/emmijokinen/TCRGP.
