Identifying repertoire response in wild mice – WILDTYPES

Quantitatively predicting the response of vertebrate immune repertoires to viral infections is essential for the informed design of vaccines, therapies and diagnostic tools. Sampling the T cells present in a given individual gives us a unique record of the ongoing and recent disease conditions. Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing techniques allow us to obtain this infection records directly from a single blood sample. However, reading it is not easy since the responses are statistical and there are many equally good solutions to the same antigenic problem. While data is available for humans, it is much harder to understand the reproducibility and convergence of responses in these cases, and connect to known immunological models that are mainly developed in mice. Combining high-throughput repertoire sequencing data, statistical data analysis and theory with cutting edge rewilding experiments, our goal is to characterize the response of T-cell immune repertoires to infections affecting mice in the wild.