PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Si-Yi Chen
AU  - Qiong Zhang
AU  - Chun-Jie Liu
AU  - An-Yuan Guo
TI  - An ultrasensitive T-cell receptor detection method for TCR-Seq and RNA-Seq data
AID  - 10.1101/740340
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 740340
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/20/740340.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/20/740340.full
AB  - T-cell receptors (TCRs) recognizing antigens play vital roles in T-cell immunology. Surveying TCR repertoires by characterizing complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) can provide valuable insights into the immune community underlying pathologic conditions, which will benefit neoantigen discovery and cancer immunotherapy. Here we present a novel tool named CATT, which can apply on TCR sequencing (TCR-Seq), RNA-Seq, and single-cell TCR(RNA)-Seq data to characterize CDR3 repertoires. CATT integrated maximum-network-flow based micro-assembly algorithm, data-driven error correction model, and Bayes classification algorithm, to self-adaptively and ultra-sensitively characterize CDR3 repertoires with high accuracy. Benchmark results of datasets from in silico and real conditions demonstrated that CATT showed superior recall and precision compared with other prevalent tools, especially for datasets with short read length and small data size. By applying CATT on a TCR-Seq dataset from aplastic anemia patients, we found the skewing of TCR repertoire was due to the oligoclonal expansion of effector memory T-cells. CATT will be a powerful tool for researchers conducting TCR and immune repertoire studies. CATT is freely available at http://bioinfo.life.hust.edu.cn/CATT.