T-cell receptor (TCR) is crucial in T cell-mediated virus clearance. To date, TCR bias has been observed in various diseases. However, studies on the TCR repertoire of COVID-19 patients are lacking. Here, we used single-cell V(D)J sequencing to conduct comparative analyses of TCR repertoire between 12 COVID-19 patients and 6 healthy controls, as well as other virus-infected samples. We observed distinct T cell clonal expansion in COVID-19. Further analysis of VJ gene combination revealed 6 VJ pairs significantly increased, while 139 pairs significantly decreased in COVID-19 patients. When considering the VJ combination of α and β chains at the same time, the combination with the highest frequency on COVID-19 was TRAV12-2-J27-TRBV7-9-J2-3. Besides, preferential usage of V and J gene segments was also observed in samples infected by different viruses. Our study provides novel insights on TCR in COVID-19, which contribute to our understanding of the immune response induced by SARS-CoV-2.

T 细胞受体 (TCR) 在 T 细胞介导的病毒清除中至关重要。迄今为止，已在多种疾病中观察到 TCR 偏差。然而，缺乏对 COVID-19 患者 TCR 库的研究。在这里，我们使用单细胞 V( D)J 测序对 12 名 COVID-19 患者和 6 名健康对照者以及其他病毒感染样本之间的 TCR 库进行比较分析。我们在 COVID-19 中观察到明显的 T 细胞克隆扩增。对 VJ 基因组合的进一步分析显示，在 COVID-19 患者中，有 6 对 VJ 显着增加，而有 139 对显着减少。同时考虑α链和β链的VJ组合时，在COVID-19上频率最高的组合是TRAV12-2-J27-TRBV7-9-J2-3。此外，在不同病毒感染的样本中也观察到V和J基因片段的优先使用。我们的研究提供了关于 COVID-19 中 TCR 的新见解，这有助于我们了解 SARS-CoV-2 诱导的免疫反应。