Page 54 - The autoimmune hypothesis of narcolepsy and its unexplored clinical features M.S. Schinkelshoek

Chapter 3
Table 3.3. H1N1-HA275-287-specificity of the generated T cell clones
Subject number
19* 24 25 26 27* 29 32 35 38 39 47 50*
TCCs tested H1N1-HA275-287-specific TCCs
50 1 25 25 11 11 11 11 109 19 5 5 14 14 12 12 11 10 4 4 22 22 130 23
52
The HLA-DQ6-H1N1-HA275-287-specific T cell receptor repertoire in NT1 patients and healthy controls shows no biased expression Recent reports describe a bias in TCR sequences for recognition of peptide- HLA complexes in CD4+ T cell mediated diseases (Qiao et al., 2014, Petersen et al., 2014). Since we were not able to show significant differences between percentages of NT1 patients and controls with HLA-DQ6-H1N1-HA275- 287-specific T cells, we searched for differences in the T cell repertoire used by NT1 patients and controls to mount immune responses to this antigen. TCRs expressed by 20 H1N1-HA275-287-specific TCCs from 4 NT1 patients and 4 H1N1-HA275-287-specific TCCs from 2 healthy controls were sequenced (Table 3.4). 18 TCR sequences were identified in TCCs of NT1 patients; 4 different TCR sequences in TCCs of healthy controls. There was expansion of some clones within a given patient, but these likely arose during the culturing process, with some T cell clones responding better to peptide hence expanding at a greater rate than others subsequently skewing the representative pool. Nevertheless, although only a small sample size was interrogated, no evidence for a biased TRAV, TRBV or CDR3 sequence motif was observed across unrelated individuals with NT1 or in healthy controls.