Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 455

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 26 of the 26 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

A Single Autoimmune T Cell Receptor Recognizes More Than a Million Different Peptides

Open access
Wooldridge, Linda, Ekeruche-Makinde, Julia, van den Berg, Hugo A., Skowera, Anna, Miles, John J., Tan, Mai Ping, Dolton, Garry, Clement, Mathew, Llewellyn-Lacey, Sian, Price, David A., Peakman, Mark, Sewell, Andrew K.·2012·Journal of Biological Chemistry

Abstract

The T cell receptor (TCR) orchestrates immune responses by binding to foreign peptides presented at the cell surface in the context of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules. Effective immunity requires that all possible foreign peptide-MHC molecules are recognized or risks leaving holes in immune coverage that pathogens could quickly evolve to exploit. It is unclear how a limited pool of <10(8) human TCRs can successfully provide immunity to the vast array of possible different peptides that could be produced from 20 proteogenic amino acids and presented by self-MHC molecules (>10(15) distinct peptide-MHCs). One possibility is that T cell immunity incorporates an extremely high level of receptor degeneracy, enabling each TCR to recognize multiple peptides. However, the extent of such TCR degeneracy has never been fully quantified. Here, we perform a comprehensive experimental and mathematical analysis to reveal that a single patient-derived autoimmune CD8(+) T cell clone of pathogenic relevance in human type I diabetes recognizes >one million distinct decamer peptides in the context of a single MHC class I molecule. A large number of peptides that acted as substantially better agonists than the wild-type "index" preproinsulin-derived peptide (ALWGPDPAAA) were identified. The RQFGPDFPTI peptide (sampled from >10(8) peptides) was >100-fold more potent than the index peptide despite differing from this sequence at 7 of 10 positions. Quantification of this previously unappreciated high level of CD8(+) T cell cross-reactivity represents an important step toward understanding the system requirements for adaptive immunity and highlights the enormous potential of TCR degeneracy to be the causative factor in autoimmune disease.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1074/jbc.m111.289488

Cites

26 of 26 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 26 references

Cited by

See all 455

Metadata

Authors
Wooldridge, L., Ekeruche-Makinde, J., van den Berg, H. A., Skowera, A., Miles, J. J., Tan, M. P., Dolton, G., Clement, M., Llewellyn-Lacey, S., Price, D. A., Peakman, M., & Sewell, A. K.
Venue
Journal of Biological Chemistry
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2012-01
Volume
287
Issue
2
Pages
1168-1177
ISSN
0021-9258 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2157384708
Cited by
455
References
26
FWCI
8.84
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A Single Autoimmune T Cell Receptor Recognizes More Than a Million Different Peptides. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1074/jbc.m111.289488
The paper
Wooldridge, L., Ekeruche-Makinde, J., van den Berg, H. A., Skowera, A., Miles, J. J., Tan, M. P., Dolton, G., Clement, M., Llewellyn-Lacey, S., Price, D. A., Peakman, M., & Sewell, A. K. (2012). A Single Autoimmune T Cell Receptor Recognizes More Than a Million Different Peptides. Journal of Biological Chemistry. https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.m111.289488

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.