A Novel Approach to T-Cell Receptor Beta Chain (TCRB) Repertoire Encoding Using Lossless String Compression

T-cell diversity is crucial for producing effective receptors that can recognize the pathogens encountered throughout life. A stochastic biological process known as VDJ recombination accounts for the high diversity of these receptors, making their analysis challenging. We present a new approach to sequence encoding and analysis, based on the Lempel-Ziv 76 algorithm (LZ-76). By creating a graph-like model, we identify specific sequence features and produce a new encoding approach to an individuals repertoire. We demonstrate that this repertoire representation allows for various applications, such as generation probability inference, informative feature vector derivation, sequence generation, and a new measure for diversity estimation.