Detection of T-cell responses to a ubiquitous cellular protein in autoimmune disease

摘要

T cells mediating autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), are difficult to characterize because they are likely to be deleted or inactivated in the thymus if the self-antigens they recognize are ubiquitously expressed. One way to obtain and analyze these autoimmune T cells is to alter T cell receptor (TCR) signaling in developing T cells to change their sensitivity to thymic negative selection, thereby allowing their thymic production. From mice thus engineered to generate T cells mediating autoimmune arthritis, we have isolated arthritogenic TCRs and characterized the self-antigens they recognized. One of them was the ubiquitously expressed 60S ribosomal protein L23a (RPL23A), with which T cells and autoantibodies from RA patients reacted. This strategy may improve our understanding of the underlying drivers of autoimmunity.