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Biology subjects

AlKhafaji, A.

Publications and source records attributed to AlKhafaji, A..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Deep mapping of the TCR-antigen interface using pMHC-pseudotyped viruses and yeast display

T cell receptor (TCR) specificity is central to the efficacy of T cell therapies, yet scalable methods to map how TCR sequences shape antigen recognition remain limited. To address this, we introduce VelociRAPTR, a library-on-library approach that combines yeast-displayed TCR libraries with pMHC-displaying virus-like particles (pMHC-VLPs) to rapidly screen millions of TCR-antigen interactions. We show that pMHC-VLPs efficiently bind TCRs on yeast and generate equivalent data to recombinantly produced pMHC protein. We then apply VelociRAPTR to screen 47 million variants of the A6 and 868 TCRs against 92 pMHCs simultaneously, mutating both the CDR3 loops and cognate peptides. The resulting CDR3-pMHC maps reveal biased recognition patterns, where mutations to CDR3 loops can selectively constrain or broaden specificity to peptide analogs. These insights provide a foundation for engineering TCRs with defined pMHC binding profiles and improving models that predict TCR-antigen interactions, including the prediction of off-target recognition. By coupling the scale of yeast display with the modularity of VLPs, VelociRAPTR offers a generalizable strategy for generating deep, high-throughput protein- protein interaction data.

immunology↗

Extraction and quantification of lineage-tracing barcodes with NextClone and CloneDetective

SummaryThe study of clonal dynamics has significantly advanced our understanding of cellular heterogeneity and lineage trajectories. With recent developments in lineage-tracing protocols such as ClonMapper or SPLINTR, which combine DNA barcoding with single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), biologists can trace the lineage and evolutionary paths of individual clones while simultaneously observing their transcriptomic changes over time. Here, we present NextClone and CloneDetective, an integrated highly scalable Nextflow pipeline and R package for efficient extraction and quantification of clonal barcodes from scRNA-seq data and DNA sequencing data tagged with lineage-tracing barcodes. We applied both NextClone and CloneDetective to data from a barcoded MCF7 cell line and demonstrate their utility for advancing clonal analysis in the era of high-throughput sequencing. Availability and implementationNextClone and CloneDetective are freely available and open-source on github (https://github.com/phipsonlab/NextClone and https://github.com/phipsonlab/CloneDetective). Documentations and tutorials for NextClone and CloneDetective can be found at https://phipsonlab.github.io/NextClone/ and https://phipsonlab.github.io/CloneDetective/respectively.

bioinformatics↗