Hi Guys and Girls,

I recently came across this journal called “T-scan: A Genome-Wide Method for the Systematic Discovery of T cell epitopes” by Tomasz Kula and colleague.

After reading it, I was so fascinated by the possibility that this technology can offer. Basically this technology takes advantage of the ability of CD8 T cells to secrete granzyme B to target cells upon recognition. What they did was they transduced target cells to express some 2882 amino acid fragments covering the cytomegalovirus (CMV) genome. I should say now that they used CMV because the epitopes are already well-established. So they used CMV as a proof-of-principle

Back to the story. They added a T cell population that can recognise a CMV antigen. They mixed the T cells with the target cells. Once the target cells get granzyme B, they fluoresce. The fluoresced cells are then collected based on their fluorescence, DNA are isolated and sequenced by next generation sequencing (NGS). Indeed, they were able to enrich the targeted epitope, which showed that the method works. They also showed that the technique can be used to identify novel epitopes.

The authors proposed that the technique can be used to apply to other areas in immunology such as cancer immunology, autoimmunity, vaccine design and many other areas.

Source: DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.07.009