High-throughput analysis of the human thymic Vδ1 ⁺ T cell receptor repertoire

Abstract

γδ T cells are a relatively rare subset of lymphocytes in the human peripheral blood, but they play important roles at the interface between the innate and the adaptive immune systems. The γδ T cell lineage is characterized by a signature γδ T cell receptor (γδTCR) that displays extensive sequence variability originated by DNA rearrangement of the corresponding V(D)J loci. Human γδ T cells comprise Vγ9Vδ2 T cells, the major subset in the peripheral blood; and Vδ1 ⁺ T cells, the predominant subpopulation in the post-natal thymus and in peripheral tissues. While less studied, Vδ1 ⁺ T cells recently gathered significant attention due to their anti-cancer and anti-viral activities. In this study we applied next-generation sequencing (NGS) to analyse the γδTCR repertoire of highly (FACS-)purified Vδ1 ⁺ T cells from human thymic biopsies. Our analysis reveals unsuspected aspects of thymically rearranged and expressed (at the mRNA level) TRG and TRD genes, thus constituting a data resource that qualifies previous conclusions on the TCR repertoire of γδ T cells developing in the human thymus.

Abstract

Design Type(s)	transcription profiling design • cellular data analysis objective
Measurement Type(s)	gamma delta T-lymphocyte
Technology Type(s)	RNA sequencing
Factor Type(s)	sex • gene
Sample Characteristic(s)	Homo sapiens • thymus

Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data (ISA-Tab format)