Single-cell TCRseq: Paired recovery of entire T-cell alpha and beta chain transcripts in T-cell receptors from single-cell RNAseq

Abstract

Accurate characterization of the repertoire of the T-cell receptor (TCR) alpha and beta chains is critical to understanding adaptive immunity. Such characterization has many applications across such fields as vaccine development and response, clone-tracking in cancer, and immunotherapy. Here we present a new methodology called single-cell TCRseq (scTCRseq) for the identification and assembly of full-length rearranged V(D)J T-cell receptor sequences from paired-end single-cell RNA sequencing reads. The method allows accurate identification of the V(D)J rearrangements for each individual T-cell and has the novel ability to recover paired alpha and beta segments. Source code is available at https://github.com/ElementoLab/scTCRseq.