TCRdb: a comprehensive database for T-cell receptor sequences with powerful search function

• Published in: Nucleic acids research 2021-01, Vol.49 (D1), p.D468-D474
• Main Authors: Chen, Si-Yi, Yue, Tao, Lei, Qian, Guo, An-Yuan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Amino Acid Sequence; Database Issue; Databases, Protein; Internet; Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell - chemistry; Search Engine
• ISSN: 0305-1048; 1362-4962
• DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkaa796

Abstract T cells and the T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire play pivotal roles in immune response and immunotherapy. TCR sequencing (TCR-Seq) technology has enabled accurate profiling TCR repertoire and currently a large number of TCR-Seq data are available in public. Based on the urgent need to effectively re-use these data, we developed TCRdb, a comprehensive human TCR sequences database, by a uniform pipeline to characterize TCR sequences on TCR-Seq data. TCRdb contains more than 277 million highly reliable TCR sequences from over 8265 TCR-Seq samples across hundreds of tissues/clinical conditions/cell types. The unique features of TCRdb include: (i) comprehensive and reliable sequences for TCR repertoire in different samples generated by a strict and uniform pipeline of TCRdb; (ii) powerful search function, allowing users to identify their interested TCR sequences in different conditions; (iii) categorized sample metadata, enabling comparison of TCRs in different sample types; (iv) interactive data visualization charts, describing the TCR repertoire in TCR diversity, length distribution and V-J gene utilization. The TCRdb database is freely available at http://bioinfo.life.hust.edu.cn/TCRdb/ and will be a useful resource in the research and application community of T cell immunology.