title: Frequent clonal expansion of peripheral T cells in patients with autoimmune diseases: a novel detecting system possibly applicable to laboratory examination.
abstract: To investigate T cell involvement in antigen-specific immune responses, it is important to detect accumulating T cells at a clonal level in vivo. However, thus far the clinical application of such analyses has been limited. Here we have established novel primers to anneal with T cell receptor (TCR) beta genes of multiple Vbeta families and applied them to reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction-single strand conformation polymorphism (RT-PCR-SSCP) analysis to evaluate peripheral T cell clonality of autoimmune disease patients. As a result, the new Vbeta primers could detect accumulating T cell clones in the periphery of healthy individuals and patients. It was revealed that patients with autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) had a larger number of clonal accumulations of peripheral T cells compared with normal individuals. Thus, the RT-PCR-SSCP system using the new multifamily Vbeta primers is the first such laboratory examination to detect T cell clonal expansion, and will provide a simple and sensitive tool to aid in the diagnosis and also in the investigation of the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases.
authors.affiliation: Rheumatology, Immunology and Genetics Program, Institute of Medical Sciences, St. Marianna University, Kanagawa, Japan. GBH01723@niftyserve.or.jp
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Masuko-Hongo
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kato
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Suzuki
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sekine
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kurokawa
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ueda
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Yamada
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nishioka
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Yamamoto
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001327:Autoimmune Diseases / Q000276:immunology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D002999:Clone Cells / Q000145:classification / Q000276:immunology*; D017931:DNA Primers / Q000235:genetics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008180:Lupus Erythematosus, Systemic / Q000276:immunology; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction; D018807:Polymorphism, Single-Stranded Conformational; D016693:Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell, alpha-beta / Q000235:genetics; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D013601:T-Lymphocytes / Q000276:immunology*
chemical_list: D017931:DNA Primers; D016693:Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell, alpha-beta