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Updated: Apr 11, 2026

T and B Cell Receptor Immune Repertoire Analysis using Next-generation Sequencing
Published on: January 12, 2021
tcR: an R package for T cell receptor repertoire advanced data analysis
Vadim I Nazarov1,2, Mikhail V Pogorelyy3, Ekaterina A Komech4
1Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, 16/10 Miklukho-Maklaya, Moscow, 117997, Russia. vdm.nazarov@gmail.com.
Background:
The Immunoglobulins (IG) and the T cell receptors (TR) play the key role in antigen recognition during the adaptive immune response. Recent progress in next-generation sequencing technologies has provided an opportunity for the deep T cell receptor repertoire profiling. However, a specialised software is required for the rational analysis of massive data generated by next-generation sequencing.
Results:
Here we introduce tcR, a new R package, representing a platform for the advanced analysis of T cell receptor repertoires, which includes diversity measures, shared T cell receptor sequences identification, gene usage statistics computation and other widely used methods. The tool has proven its utility in recent research studies.
Conclusions:
tcR is an R package for the advanced analysis of T cell receptor repertoires after primary TR sequences extraction from raw sequencing reads. The stable version can be directly installed from The Comprehensive R Archive Network ( http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html ). The source code and development version are available at tcR GitHub ( http://imminfo.github.io/tcr/ ) along with the full documentation and typical usage examples.
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