Fig. 4

Persistent TCRβs were enriched in highly public TCRβs. We identified public TCRβs occurring in 0–10%, 0–20%, . . . 90–100% of individuals in an independent, large cohort of similarly profiled subjects (N = 778). For each of these decile bins, we examined TCRβs shared across each of our three individuals’ time series data and tallied the number of time points at which we observed each TCRβ. a Vertical histograms of these distributions indicate that more-private TCRβs—TCRβs shared by few people—occurred most often at only a single time point, while more-public TCRβs tended to persist across time. b The number of TCRβs evaluated in each decile bin. The vast majority of receptors were not shared or were shared across few individuals (also see Additional file 1: Figure S13b). c In all three individuals in this study, persistent TCRβs included greater numbers of highly public TCRβs—defined here as receptors shared by over 70% of subjects from the large cohort—than receptors that only occurred once (independent t-test, statistic = − 4.508, p = 0.01). Asterisks indicate p < 0.05. d The three most public TCRβs (in over 90% of 778 individuals) were also persistent in all three individuals