IDDM Patients Neither Show Humoral Reactivities Against Endogenous Retroviral Envelope Protein Nor Do They Differ in Retroviral mRNA Expression From Healthy Relatives or Normal Individuals

摘要

Recently, human endogenous retrovirus type K (HERV-K [IDDMK_1,222]) was isolated from an IDDM patient's β-cell supernatant and shown to be implicated in expression as a superantigen. Furthermore, HERV-K RNA was found in plasma samples from newly diagnosed patients but not in those from healthy control subjects. We had earlier iden- tified the presence of a HERV-K long terminal repeat ele- ment of the MLA DQ gene (DQ-LTR0 to be positively associated with IDDM, which led us to investigate whether DQ-LTR is related to transcription of the puta- tive retroviral superantigen.