Persisting fetal clonotypes influence the structure and overlap of adult human T cell receptor repertoires
Fig 4
Lifetime of abundant in-frame TCR beta clonotypes with zero insertions.
The fraction of zero-insertion clonotypes among the 2000 most abundant clonotypes in the unpartitioned repertoire as a function of age (black circles) is well fitted by an exponentially decaying function of time (black curve). This decay is faster than would be predicted from the decay of the naive compartment alone (red curve), indicating a slow decay of zero-insertion clonotypes of fetal origin. Red diamonds show percentage of naive T-cells measured using flow cytometry (see [23] for details). Scale of red axis was chosen so that the two decay curves start at the same point at age 0, and have the same long-time limit. We present the analysis for different bin sizes in S10 Fig.