FREQUENT CLONAL EXPANSION OF PERIPHERAL T-CELLS IN PATIENTS WITH AUTOIMMUNE-DISEASES - A NOVEL DETECTING SYSTEM POSSIBLY APPLICABLE TO LABORATORY EXAMINATION

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 V beta families and applied them to reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction-single strand conformation polymorphism (RT-PCR-SSCP) analysis to evaluate peripher al T cell clonality of autoimmune disease patients. As a result, the n ew V beta primers could detect accumulating T cell clones in the perip hery of healthy individuals and patients. It was revealed that patient s with autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) had a larger number of clonal accumulations of peripheral T cells comp ared with normal individuals. Thus, the RT-PCR-SSCP system using the n ew multifamily V beta primers is the first such laboratory examination to detect T cell clonal expansion, and will provide a simple and sens itive tool to aid in the diagnosis and also in the investigation of th e pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases. (C) 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.