T Cell Thoughts

Abstract

This review does not aspire to provide comprehensive coverage of any particular area. Rather, it is an attempt to reconsider and summarize the results produced by our team in the field of TCR repertoires over the past 15 years, and to correct some of the errors along the way. As intended, it is unavoidably subjective, one-sided, and full of citations to the author's publications. Nevertheless, I hope it will be useful to the immunological community. Someone, having read this relatively short text, will realize that there is no need to spend time studying our previous publications. And one might discover the only useful point of our collective effort hidden in a Supplementary Figure X of a previously unnoticed publication Y. The key points are formulated below as a set of short chapters. Their order does not follow the chronology of the cited works and only intermittently resembles a coherent narrative. In an attempt to summarize, we will speak here about the TCR repertoire preferences of T cell subsets, the plasticity and stubbornness of clonal memory, the price we pay for the privilege of possessing adaptive immunity, some secrets of healthy longevity, about repertoire-based diagnostics, and about immunotherapeutic approaches considered as a toolbox for correcting mistakes made by the immune system.