Human thymic T cell repertoire is imprinted with strong convergence to shared sequences

A highly diverse repertoire of T cell antigen receptors (TCR) is created in the thymus by recombination of gene segments and the insertion or deletion of nucleotides at the junctions. Using next-generation TCR sequencing we define here the features of recombination and selection in the human TCRα and TCRβ locus, and show that a strikingly high proportion of the repertoire is shared by unrelated individuals. The thymic TCRα nucleotide repertoire...