An individual's T cell repertoire is skewed towards some specificities as a result of past antigen exposure and subsequent clonal expansion. Identifying T cell receptor signatures associated with a disease is challenging due to the overall complexity of antigens and polymorphic HLA allotypes. In celiac disease, the antigen epitopes are well characterised and the specific HLA-DQ2-restricted T-cell repertoire associated with the disease has been explored in depth. By investigating T cell receptor repertoires of unsorted lamina propria T cells from 15 individuals, we provide the first proof-of-concept study showing that it could be possible to infer disease state by matching against a priori known disease-associated T cell receptor sequences.

由于过去的抗原暴露和随后的克隆扩增，个体的T细胞库偏向某些特异性。由于抗原和多态性HLA同种异型的总体复杂性，鉴定与疾病相关的T细胞受体特征具有挑战性。在乳糜泻中，抗原表位得到了很好的表征，并且与该疾病相关的特定的HLA-DQ2限制性T细胞库已被深入研究。通过研究来自15个个体的未分选的固有层T细胞的T细胞受体库，我们提供了第一个概念验证研究，表明可以通过与先验已知的疾病相关T细胞受体序列进行匹配来推断疾病状态。