Immune fingerprinting through repertoire similarity

PLoS Genet. 2021 Jan 4;17(1):e1009301. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1009301. eCollection 2021 Jan.

Abstract

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • CD4-Positive T-Lymphocytes / immunology
  • Humans
  • Immune System / immunology*
  • Lymphocytes / immunology*
  • Models, Statistical*
  • Precision Medicine
  • Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell / genetics
  • Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell / immunology*
  • Twins, Monozygotic / genetics

Substances

  • Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell

Grants and funding

The study was supported by the European Research Council COG 724208 (AMW). A.A.M and M.V.P. are supported by RSF-20-15-00351, Russian Science Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.