Michelle L Joachims, Kerry M Leehan, Christina Lawrence, Richard C Pelikan, Jacen S Moore, Zijian Pan, Astrid Rasmussen, Lida Radfar, David M Lewis, Kiely M Grundahl, Jennifer A Kelly, Graham B Wiley, Mikhail Shugay, Dmitriy M Chudakov, Christopher J Lessard, Donald U Stone, R Hal Scofield, Courtney G Montgomery, Kathy L Sivils, Linda F Thompson, A Darise Farris
CD4+ T cells predominate in salivary gland (SG) inflammatory lesions in Sjögren's syndrome (SS). However, their antigen specificity, degree of clonal expansion, and relationship to clinical disease features remain unknown. We used multiplex reverse-transcriptase PCR to amplify paired T cell receptor α (TCRα) and β transcripts of single CD4+ CD45RA- T cells from SG and peripheral blood (PB) of 10 individuals with primary SS, 9 of whom shared the HLA DR3/DQ2 risk haplotype. TCRα and β sequences were obtained from a median of 91 SG and 107 PB cells per subject...
June 2, 2016: JCI Insight