T-cell Repertoire Characteristics of Asymptomatic and Re-detectable Positive COVID-19 Patients

  1. Jianhua Xu
  2. Yaling Shi
  3. Yongsi Wang
  4. Yuntao Liu
  5. Dongzi Lin
  6. Jiaqi Zhang
  7. Jing Lin
  8. Wei Hu
  9. Haolan He
  10. Wei Wang
  11. Wentao Fan
  12. Linlin Li
  13. Hai Lan
  14. Chunliang Lei
  15. Kejian Wang
  16. Dawei Wang

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Abstract

Background

The prevention of COVID-19 pandemic is highly complicated by the prevalence of asymptomatic and recurrent infection. Many previous immunological studies have focused on symptomatic and convalescent patients, while the immune responses in asymptomatic patients and re-detectable positive cases remain unclear.

Methods

Here we comprehensively analyzed the peripheral T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire of 54 COVID-19 patients in different phases, including asymptomatic, symptomatic, convalescent and re-detectable positive cases.

Results

We found progressed immune responses from asymptomatic to symptomatic phase. Furthermore, the TCR profiles of re-detectable positive cases were highly similar to those of asymptomatic patients, which could predict the risk of recurrent infection.

Conclusion

Therefore, TCR repertoire surveillance has the potential to strengthen the clinical management and the immunotherapy development for COVID-19.

Funding

The Science and Technology Innovation Project of Foshan Municipality (2020001000431) and the National Key Research and Development Project (2020YFA0708001).

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.03.433579: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: Patients: This study was approved by the ethics committees of the above four participant hospitals.
    Consent: Written informed consent was obtained from all participants enrolled in this study.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Several limitations of our study should be taken into consideration. Firstly, multiple phases of COVID-19 were characterized by blood samples collected from different individuals, rather than sequential samples from the same infected patients. Therefore, additional longitudinal studies are needed to calibrate the immunological trajectories of COVID-19. Secondly, the enrolled patients were treated with diverse therapies and medications, which may have divergent immunomodulatory effects. Subsequent efforts will optimally require well-controlled clinical trials with unified treatment protocol. In addition, due to limited volume of blood that could be collected in isolation wards, the HLA typing was not performed by DNA sequencing or PCR but estimated with mRNA sequencing data. Thus, the uncertain relevance between HLA alleles and TCR repertoire in COVID-19 should be further explored. Altogether, this study provided novel insights into the TCR profiles of COVID-19 patients in different phases. A better understanding of the adaptive immunity in COVID-19 could strengthen clinical management and immunotherapy development. Further analyses on large-scale immune repertoire datasets (35, 36) would be required to extend our findings.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.03.03.433579 on bioRxiv