The aim of this study was to find out how MHC heterogeneity affects the T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire of naive CD4 T cells in mice. This work aimed to provide a mechanistic link between genetic background and phenotypic TCR repertoire. The focus of this work is to address a basic unsolved immunological question. However, understanding how different MHC alleles dictate the specific selection of diverse TCR repertoires could have enormous practical use in guiding the development of personalized vaccines, in monitoring autoimmune development, and predicting the responses of patients to infectious disease or immunotherapy checkpoint blockade.
Description of samples:
Because it is, at the moment, impossible to identify all the TCRs expressed in an individual wild type mouse we bred animals on the C57BL/6 background that were heterozygous for TCRalpha expression and also expressed a transgenic TCRbeta chain and no other TCRbetas. Consequently, in these animals, the transgenic TCRbeta is the only one expressed and each T cell expresses a single, varying TCRalpha chain. Thus the TCR repertoire in the animal can be understood by sequencing the expressed TCRalpha genes. Deposited samples are RNA sequencing reads of these recombined TCRalpha genes. Animals of this genotype were bred to express on the C57BL/6 background, homozygously, H-2b, H-2f, H-2g7 or H-2s. MHC heterozygotes were produced by intercrossing these animals. Less...