We recently released a flexible and high throughput single cell sequencing method that leverages split-pool combinatorial barcoding to simultaneously profile the Whole Transcriptome (WT) and T cell receptor (TCR) sequences of up to 1 million human T cells from up to 96 samples. This technology is able to recover reproducibly paired TCR sequences in the majority of assayed T cells across different sample types (CAR-Ts, culture activated T cells, and more). We report on the extension of our method to be able to recover the immune repertoire and gene expression profiles from mouse T cells. We use our assay to characterize TCR diversity changes during the mouse lifecycle.
We profile hundreds of thousands of mouse spleen-resident T cells at different stages of life. We perform transcriptome-based clustering and demonstrate that this approach identifies all major T cell populations (CD4+, CD8+, Tregs, etc.) while simultaneously detecting TCR sequences. Furthermore, we show differences in clonotype diversity that correlate with age and are consistent with previous findings. We envision our method will help researchers gain additional insights in mouse models of autoimmune and infectious diseases, as well as cancer.
