Determining the order of nucleic acid residues in biological samples is an integral component of a wide variety of research applications. Over the last fifty years large numbers of researchers have applied themselves to the production of techniques and technologies to facilitate this feat, sequencing DNA and RNA molecules. This time-scale has witnessed tremendous changes, moving from sequencing short oligonucleotides to millions of bases, from struggling towards the deduction of the coding sequence of a single gene to rapid and widely available whole genome sequencing. This article traverses those years, iterating through the different generations of sequencing technology, highlighting some of the key discoveries, researchers, and sequences along the way.

The T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire can provide a personalized biomarker for infectious and non-infectious diseases. We describe a protocol for amplifying, sequencing, and analyzing TCRs which is robust, sensitive, and versatile. The key experimental step is ligation of a single-stranded oligonucleotide to the 3′ end of the TCR cDNA. This allows amplification of all possible rearrangements using a single set of primers per locus. It also introduces a unique molecular identifier to label each starting cDNA molecule. This molecular identifier is used to correct for sequence errors and for effects of differential PCR amplification efficiency, thus producing more accurate measures of the true TCR frequency within the sample. This integrated experimental and computational pipeline is applied to the analysis of human memory and naive subpopulations, and results in consistent measures of diversity and inequality. After error correction, the distribution of TCR sequence abundance in all subpopulations followed a power law over a wide range of values. The power law exponent differed between naïve and memory populations, but was consistent between individuals. The integrated experimental and analysis pipeline we describe is appropriate to studies of T cell responses in a broad range of physiological and pathological contexts.

A type flaw attack on a security protocol is an attack where a field that was originally intended to have one type is subsequently interpreted as having another type. A number of type flaw attacks have appeared in the academic literature. In this paper we prove that type flaw attacks can be prevented using a simple technique of tagging each field with some information indicating its intended type.

HIV infection profoundly affects many parameters of the immune system and ultimately leads to AIDS, yet which factors are most important for determining resistance, pathology, and response to antiretroviral treatment – and how best to monitor them – remain unclear. We develop a quantitative high-throughput sequencing pipeline to characterize the TCR repertoires of HIV-infected individuals before and after antiretroviral therapy, working from small, unfractionated samples of peripheral blood. This reveals the TCR repertoires of HIV+ individuals to be highly perturbed, with considerably reduced diversity as a small proportion of sequences are highly overrepresented. HIV also causes specific qualitative changes to the repertoire including an altered distribution of V gene usage, depletion of public TCR sequences, and disruption of TCR networks. Short-term antiretroviral therapy has little impact on most of the global damage to repertoire structure, but is accompanied by rapid changes in the abundance of many individual TCR sequences, decreases in abundance of the most common sequences, and decreases in the majority of HIV-associated CDR3 sequences. Thus, high-throughput repertoire sequencing of small blood samples that are easy to take, store, and process can shed light on various aspects of the T-cell immune compartment and stands to offer insights into patient stratification and immune reconstitution.

The Decombinator package is implemented in Python (v2.6) and is freely available at https://github.com/uclinfectionimmunity/Decombinator along with full documentation and examples of typical usage.