Development of a laboratory examination system for T cell clonality analysis.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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 sush analyzes has been limeted. Here we have established novel primers to anneal with T cell reseptor (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 autoimmue 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 systemic using the new multifamily Vbeta primers is the first such laboratory examination to detect T cell clonal expantion, and will provide a simple and sensitive tool to aid in the diagnosis and also in the investigation of the pathoqenes of autoimmune diseases.