Quantification of inter-sample differences in T cell receptor sequences

2 Inter-sample comparisons of the T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire are crucial for gaining a better 3 understanding into the immunological states determined by different collections of T cells from 4 different donor sites, cell types, and genetic and pathological backgrounds. As a theoretical 5 approach for the quantitative comparison, previous studies utilized the Poisson abundance models 6 and the conventional methods in ecology, which focus on the abundance distribution of observed 7 TCR sequences. However, these methods ignore the details of the measured sequences and are 8 consequently unable to identify sub-repertoires that might have the contributions to the observed 9 inter-sample differences. In this paper, we propose a new comparative approach based on TCR 10 1 not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/128025 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Apr. 17, 2017;