Characteristics of T cell receptor repertoires of patients with acute myocardial infarction through high-throughput sequencing

BACKGROUND: T cells are key regulators of immunity and one of the cells recruited in atherosclerosis and participated in various stages of the development of atherosclerosis. Characterizing T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoires is a priority of great scientific interest and potential clinical utility for the early diagnosis, risk stratification and prognostic evaluation of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). METHODS: The TCR repertoires in 21 subjects including 7 patients with non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI), 6 patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and 8 subjects with normal coronary artery (NCA) as control were characterized by using high-throughput sequencing. Bioinformatics analysis were performed. RESULTS: Patients with NSTEMI displayed more diverse TCR sequences than NCA controls, but they had lower percentage of top 200 TCR sequences. However, no significant differences were observed between the patients with STEMI and NCA controls, but STEMI group had lower percentage of top 200 TCR sequences. T cells from patients with AMI and NCA controls showed a differential V and J gene usage, especially, significant difference was observed in frequencies of V gene (TRBV2, TRBV29-1, TRBV30 and TRBV12-3) and J gene (TRBJ2-1) usage. Furthermore, significantly differences in average overlap was observed in groups of AMI and NCA control. The results showed that patients with AMI had distinct TCR repertoires which revealed the association between cardiovascular condition and T-cell clonotypes. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings revealed the differences of TCR repertoires between patients with AMI and NCA controls, which might be potential biomarkers for evaluating risk stratification or diagnosis of acute coronary syndrome. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12967-019-1768-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.