Figure 4. Comparison of the diversities of the Vβ10⁺ TCRβ repertoires involved in the CD8⁺ T cell responses to the gB-8p epitope in the HSV-1, Lm-gB, and VACV-gB infections.

TCRβ clonotypic diversity was measured using both the number of different TCRβ clonotypes (A) and Simpson's diversity index (B). Simpson's diversity index accounts for both the number of different TCRβ clonotypes and the number of copies of each clonotype (i.e. the clonal dominance hierarchy) and varies between 0 (minimum diversity) and 1 (maximum diversity). The TCRβ diversities were estimated for all samples having an equal sample size of 39 TCRβ sequences. The diversity of the CDRβ sequences was considered by determining the prevalence of the tryptophan-glycine (WG) doublet in CDR3β positions 6 and 7, as shown in Table II (which correspond to CDR3 positions 3 and 4 using the Chothia definition (29)). Shown are the percentages of the TCRβ clonotypes per mouse (C) and the percentages of the TCRβ repertoires per mouse (i.e. including the number of copies of the clonotypes) (D) that feature a WG doublet in CDR3β positions 6 and 7. A Kruskal-Wallis test was used to determine that there were no significant differences in TCRβ repertoire diversity between the HSV-1, Lm-gB, and VACV-gB infections.