Your gut microbiome shapes your T cell repertoire - a Cell Reports study using DETECT

The gut microbiome shapes your T cell repertoire — not just at mucosal surfaces, but in peripheral blood too. That’s the core finding of the AIRRWAS study, published in Cell Reports by researchers at the University of Antwerp.

Using a framework that integrates TCR sequencing with gut microbiome profiling, the team identified reproducible associations between 21 bacterial genera and convergent TCR signatures across three independent cohorts. The findings were validated with targeted in vitro bacterial stimulation experiments, confirming the predicted interactions were functional.

ImmuneWatch DETECT was used to annotate over 150,000 TCRs with epitope specificity — providing the biological context to interpret which clones were antigen-driven and which were linked to microbiome-associated signals.

The result is the first network-based framework capable of predicting TCR-bacteria interactions at this resolution.