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Updated: Aug 6, 2026

Measurement of T Cell Alloreactivity Using Imaging Flow Cytometry
09:04

Measurement of T Cell Alloreactivity Using Imaging Flow Cytometry

Published on: April 19, 2017

A Donor T-Cell Receptor Structural Signature Determines Alloreactive Potential and Predicts Acute Graft-Versus-Host

Ximi K Wang1, Ajna Uzuni1, Lingting Shi2,3

  • 1Columbia Center for Translational Immunology, Department of Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York, New York, USA.

Biorxiv : the Preprint Server for Biology
|July 17, 2026
PubMed

Acute graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) remains a lethal barrier to successful allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation, yet pre-transplant donor selection entirely ignores hypervariable T-cell receptor (TCR) architecture. Here, by characterizing over 64,000 alloreactive clonotypes, we demonstrate that human alloreactivity is dictated by a constrained, predictable baseline structural signature. Pathogenic, tissue-infiltrating alloreactive T cells exhibit significantly shortened CDR3β regions, altered antigen-facing biophysical features, biased VJ gene usage and extensive inter-donor sharing originating from public anti-pathogen memory reservoirs. These potent clones natively cluster within the high-frequency fraction of the unstimulated baseline donor repertoire. We introduce R50, an assay-independent metric quantifying this clonal dominance, which independently predicted a six-fold increased risk of acute GVHD in a cross-institutional cohort. This scalable in silico platform shifts pre-transplant risk stratification from HLA typing and demographic surrogates to precision immune-receptor modeling.

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