Revising B Cell Receptors

Revising B Cell Receptors

B cell development is often portrayed as a series of decision points that expand an antigen-reactive cell to a clone producing a single antibody. This is hardly the case: B cell development is dependent on a series of error-prone, random rearrangement events that through ongoing diversification reach a compromise in which most cells are not au-toreactive (except in disease) and the majority of ...

B lymphocytes may escape tolerance by revising their antigen receptors

To explore mechanisms that prevent autoreactivity in nonautoimmune mice, endogenous immunoglobulin (Ig) light (L) chains that associate with a transgenic anti-DNA heavy chain were analyzed. The antibodies from splenic B cell hybridomas of such mice did not bind double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) and their L chain sequences showed a biased use of V kappa and J kappa gene segments. The 44 L chains in th...

Revising the Cell Ontology

Organisation of B-cell receptors on the cell membrane.

B-cell receptors (BCRs) have been reported to organise into oligomeric clusters on the B-cell surface, and mutations, that are likely to interfere with such clustering, result in B-cell unresponsiveness. This has led to the suggestion that pre-formed BCR clusters may be crucial for B-cell signalling. However, neither the size nor the fraction of BCRs organised in such clusters have yet been det...

Self-antigen recognition by follicular lymphoma B-cell receptors.

Follicular lymphoma is a monoclonal B-cell malignancy with each patient's tumor expressing a unique cell surface immunoglobulin (Ig), or B-cell receptor (BCR), that can potentially recognize antigens and/or transduce signals into the tumor cell. Here we evaluated the reactivity of tumor derived Igs for human tissue antigens. Self-reactivity was observed in 26% of tumor Igs (25 of 98). For one f...