PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Thomas Dupic
AU  - Quentin Marcou
AU  - Aleksandra M. Walczak
AU  - Thierry Mora
TI  - Genesis of the <em>αβ</em> T-cell receptor
AID  - 10.1101/353128
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 353128
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/11/353128.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/11/353128.full
AB  - The T-cell (TCR) repertoire relies on the diversity of receptors composed of two chains, called α and β, to recognize pathogens. Using results of high throughput sequencing and computational chain-pairing experiments of human TCR repertoires, we quantitively characterize the αβ generation process. We estimate the probabilities of a rescue recombination of the β chain on the second chromosome upon failure or success on the first chromosome. Unlike β chains, α chains recombine simultaneously on both chromosomes, resulting in correlated statistics of the two genes which we predict using a mechanistic model. We find that ∼28% of cells express both α chains. Altogether, our statistical analysis gives a complete quantitative mechanistic picture that results in the observed correlations in the generative process. We learn that the probability to generate any TCRαβ is lower than 10–12 and estimate the generation diversity and sharing properties of the αβ TCR repertoire.