Figure 5.

Distance from germline of the most prevalent private and public clones in RE brain tissue. The top five percent of CDR3 amino acid sequences in the RE brain samples comprise 133 public and 88 private TCR clones (based on Vβ Dβ, and Jβ usage and the number of nucleotide insertions and deletions at the Vβ/Dβ and Dβ/Jβ boundaries). Summing the number of nucleotide insertions and deletions at the Vβ/Dβ and Dβ/Jβ boundaries provides a measure of the distance from germline of the clone; a larger number reflects a greater distance. The difference between the private and public clones was statistically significant (P = < 0.0001, Mann–Whitney test).