Estimation and Distribution of T-Cell Repertoire During Human HSV-2 Infection

• Activity Number: 35
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, July 31, 2016 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics
• Author(s): Alvason Li* and Jia Zhu and Trevor Bedford
• Companies: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
• Keywords: T cell repertoire ; Power law distribution ; Yule Simon distribution ; Multivariate Ewens Distribution ; Circle packing ; Chinese restaurant process

Abstract

A highly diverse T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire is observed during natural human herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2) infection. However, an accurately diversity estimation of T-cell repertoires is challenging and lacking. In this study, parametric models are applied for estimating the clonal size distribution of TCR dynamics from high throughtput sequencing data. Strikingly, the abundance of each unique TCR sequence closely followed Power-law, and Yule-Simon distributions. In comparison with the expectation of clonal size distribution from Ewens-sampling, an insight of TCR dynamics is given. The implications of the findings for theoretical understanding of the diversity of human immunoglobulin repertoire are discussed. Moreover, an effective Python package of Yule-Simon and Multivariate Ewens distributions, as well as a home-made circle-packing algorithm for visualizing T-cell clonal distribution are developed.