Immune fingerprinting through repertoire similarity

Immune repertoires provide a unique fingerprint reflecting the immune history of individuals, with potential applications in precision medicine. However, the question of how personal that information is and how it can be used to identify individuals has not been explored. Here, we show that individu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PLoS genetics 2021-01, Vol.17 (1), p.e1009301-e1009301
Main Authors: Dupic, Thomas, Bensouda Koraichi, Meriem, Minervina, Anastasia A, Pogorelyy, Mikhail V, Mora, Thierry, Walczak, Aleksandra M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptive immunology
Analysis
Biology and Life Sciences
CD4-Positive T-Lymphocytes - immunology
DNA testing
Humans
Identification and classification
Immune recognition
Immune System - immunology
Immunoglobulin genes
Immunology
Life Sciences
Lymphocytes - immunology
Medicine and Health Sciences
Methods
Models, Statistical
Precision Medicine
Quantitative Methods
Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell - genetics
Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell - immunology
Research and Analysis Methods
Twins, Monozygotic - genetics
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Summary:Immune repertoires provide a unique fingerprint reflecting the immune history of individuals, with potential applications in precision medicine. However, the question of how personal that information is and how it can be used to identify individuals has not been explored. Here, we show that individuals can be uniquely identified from repertoires of just a few thousands lymphocytes. We present "Immprint," a classifier using an information-theoretic measure of repertoire similarity to distinguish pairs of repertoire samples coming from the same versus different individuals. Using published T-cell receptor repertoires and statistical modeling, we tested its ability to identify individuals with great accuracy, including identical twins, by computing false positive and false negative rates < 10-6 from samples composed of 10,000 T-cells. We verified through longitudinal datasets that the method is robust to acute infections and that the immune fingerprint is stable for at least three years. These results emphasize the private and personal nature of repertoire data.
ISSN:1553-7404
1553-7390
1553-7404
DOI:10.1371/journal.pgen.1009301