Taotao Lin, Chao Qin, Ruixiong Du, Qijian Lu, Zhiyi Wang, Rongcan Wu, Hailin Lin, Xianfeng Lin, Gang Chen, Wenge Liu, Zhenyu Wang
Injured male rat spinal cord tissue contained detectable BCR repertoire signals with descriptive variation across post-injury time points, supporting the feasibility of longitudinal repertoire profiling in this setting. These data provide a receptor-level resource for SCI neuroimmunology and support future studies to clarify antigen specificity, functional relevance, and translational potential of post-injury B-cell responses.
PURPOSE: B cell receptor (BCR) repertoire features detectable in injured spinal cord tissue after traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) remain poorly characterized. This study performed an exploratory longitudinal analysis of immunoglobulin heavy-chain (IGH) and light-chain (IGL) repertoire features in injured rat spinal cord tissue.
METHODS: Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats underwent traumatic SCI using a modified Allen's weight-drop model. Lesion-centered spinal cord tissues were collected at 1, 3, 7, 14, and 28 days post-injury, with four biological replicates per time point. BCR repertoire sequencing was used to assess functional sequence composition, isotype or constant-region distribution, sequencing saturation, diversity indices, germline-divergence metrics, V/J gene usage, V-J pairing, CDR3 length distribution, dominant clonotype abundance, and repertoire similarity. Uninjured baseline libraries failed construction; therefore, analyses were restricted to post-injury samples and interpreted descriptively.
RESULTS: Productive BCR sequences were detected across injured spinal cord samples, and saturation curves supported repertoire coverage in most samples. IGH repertoires showed greater inter-sample heterogeneity in isotype composition, diversity indices, germline-divergence metrics, V/J gene usage, V-J pairing, CDR3 length distribution, dominant clonotype abundance, and clonotype sharing. In contrast, IGL repertoires were predominantly IgK-associated and showed a restricted CDR3 length distribution centered at 11 amino acids, with higher repertoire sharing. These heavy- and light-chain contrasts are best interpreted as repertoire-architecture differences within the post-injury dataset.
CONCLUSION: Injured male rat spinal cord tissue contained detectable BCR repertoire signals with descriptive variation across post-injury time points, supporting the feasibility of longitudinal repertoire profiling in this setting. These data provide a receptor-level resource for SCI neuroimmunology and support future studies to clarify antigen specificity, functional relevance, and translational potential of post-injury B-cell responses.