Clontech Laboratories, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Takara Bio Inc.,  announced the upcoming launch of the SMARTer Human TCR a/b Profiling Kit. This system leverages SMART technology and employs a 5' RACE-like approach to capture complete V(D)J variable regions of TCR transcripts, enabling users to analyze T-cell receptor (TCR) diversity from human RNA samples or directly from cells.

In humans and closely related species, cellular immunity is mediated by T cells, which participate directly in the detection and neutralization of pathogenic threats. Highly specialized extracellular TCRs selectively bind specific antigens in order to activate T cells, causing them to proliferate rapidly and mount immune responses through the release of cytokines. Given the specificity of TCR-antigen interactions, a tremendous range of TCRs are required to recognize the wide assortment of pathogenic agents one might encounter.

"We recognize that TCR repertoire analysis is an area of major interest with significant clinical applications" commented Carol Lou, President of Clontech Laboratories, Inc. "Unlike other kits for TCR profiling which work with genomic DNA, our SMARTer Human TCR a/b Profiling Kit works with mRNA and will allow researchers to capture and amplify variable regions of TCR-a and TCR-ß subunits, providing faithful representation of TCR diversity with unparalleled sensitivity. Because mRNA templates are more highly represented than DNA templates in each T cell, they provide an opportunity to sequence with greater sensitivity and to identify more unique TCR variants, including those that are present in a very small proportion of T cells."

"This RACE-based method of TCR profiling circumvents the technical limitations of traditional multiplex PCR analysis, which is susceptible to biases imposed by the various primer pairs. The SMARTer Human TCR a/b Profiling Kit allows for simpler amplification of TCR variable regions with single primer pairs, minimizing the potential for amplification bias" noted Andrew Farmer, vice president of research and development at Clontech Laboratories, Inc.

The SMARTer Human TCR a/b Profiling Kit has been shown to yield high-quality sequencing libraries from as little as 10 ng to 3 µg of total RNA obtained from peripheral blood leukocytes, or from 50 to 10,000 purified T cells. As the name suggests, the kit can be used to generate data for both alpha- and beta-chain diversity, either in the same experiment or separately. Libraries produced with the kit are indexed and ready for sequencing on Illumina platforms.


Clontech Laboratories, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Takara Bio Inc., develops, manufactures, and distributes a wide range of life science kits and reagents under the Takara, Clontech, and Cellartis brands.

Takara Bio Inc. is an innovative biotechnology company based in Shiga, Japan. As a world leader in biotechnology research and development, Takara Bio was the first company to market PCR technology in Japan and is also the developer of the RetroNectin reagent, which is used as a world standard in gene therapy protocols.