Quantifying Distribution of Flow Cytometric TCR-Vβ Usage with Economic Statistics.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 25923356.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0125373 and PMC identifier 4414620.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Measuring changes of the T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire is important to many fields of medicine. Flow cytometry is a popular technique to study the TCR repertoire, as it quickly provides insight into the TCR-Vβ usage among well-defined populations of T cells. However, the interpretation of the flow cytometric data remains difficult, and subtle TCR repertoire changes may go undetected. Here, we introduce a novel means for analyzing the flow cytometric data on TCR-Vβ usage. By applying economic statistics, we calculated the Gini-TCR skewing index from the flow cytometric TCR-Vβ analysis. The Gini-TCR skewing index, which is a direct measure of TCR-Vβ distribution among T cells, allowed us to track subtle changes of the TCR repertoire among distinct populations of T cells. Application of the Gini-TCR skewing index to the flow cytometric TCR-Vβ analysis will greatly help to gain better understanding of the TCR repertoire in health and disease.
Medical subject headings
- Cell Differentiation
- Flow Cytometry
- Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell, alpha-beta
- T-Lymphocytes, Cytotoxic