The dynamics and association of B and T cell receptor repertoires upon antibody response to hepatitis B vaccination in healthy adults

ABSTRACT

The Hepatitis B (HB) vaccine is efficacious in preventing hepatitis B virus infection. However, the association between antibody response to the HB vaccine and dynamic immune repertoire changes in different cell subsets remains unclear. Nine healthy participants were administered three doses of HB vaccine following the 0, 1, 6 month schedule. Peripheral CD4⁺ T, memory B (MB), naïve B (NB), and plasma cells (PCs) were sorted before vaccination and 7 days following each dose. The complementary determining region 3 of T-cell receptor β (TCRβ) chain and B-cell receptor (BCR) heavy chain (IgG, IgM, IgA) repertoires were analyzed by high-throughput sequencing. All nine participants elicited protective antibody titers to the vaccine at the end of immunization. Compared with the baseline, MB cells showed a significant increase in IgG usage and decreased IgM usage and repertoire diversity at the end of vaccination. TCRβ diversity changes were highly correlated with those of the BCR in MB cells in participants with a faster and robust antibody responses. The percentage of shared clonotypes between NB and MB cells, and MB cells and PCs were much higher than that between NB cells and PCs. The more clonotypes sharing the faster and stronger antibody responses were observed after HB vaccination. These results suggest the integral involvement of MB cells in vaccine immunization. Interaction between CD4⁺ T and MB cells and B cell differentiation may improve antibody response to HB vaccine.

KEYWORDS:

• Hepatitis B vaccine
• antibody response
• B cell receptor
• T cell receptor
• repertoire

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the volunteers participating in the study, and Ms. Mingxia Zhang and Ms. Junhua Yin from Nanfang Hospital for vaccine inoculation and blood collection.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2021.1913028

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [81772600]; the National Science and Technology Major Project [2018ZX10301202]; the Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou [201803010041]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.