Annotation of pseudogenic gene segments by massively parallel sequencing of rearranged lymphocyte receptor loci

In this proof-of-principle study, we used high-throughput sequencing of the TCRβ locus of a large cohort of healthy volunteers to evaluate the use of functional and non-functional alleles of individual TCRβ V gene segments. With some modifications, our method has the potential to be extended to gene segments in the α, γ, and δ TCR loci, as well as the genes encoding for B-cell receptor chains.