Probing T cell thymic maturation through repertoire sequencing

In order to protect themselves against external threats, vertebrates have developed an adaptive mechanism of immune defence where a leading role is played by T lymphocytes -- cells able to identify to short protein fragments of viral origin through a unique receptor. After the stochastic generation of the receptor, T cells undergo a selection process known as thymic maturation which aims at releasing into the host periphery only those cells with functional and weakly self-reactive receptors. From high-throughput sequencing of different repertoires FACS-sorted in the thymus provided, we use inference techniques to learn interpretable models for the selected features informative about the maturation cascade. Our results suggest that thymic maturation is a stochastic process of single cell promotion enhanced by cell-cell interactions.