TCR Vβ Usage of TSH Receptor-specific CD4+T Cells in Graves' Disease Patients and Healthy Humans

TCR-Vβ Usage in the Thymus and Blood of Myasthenia Gravis Patients

“…This is likely to be due to a low frequency of T cells expressing this gene family, rather than poor amplification efficiency of the primers, because in previous studies using these primers [10,38] we found that some antigen-specific CD4 + T cell lines preferentially used the V 20 family. Previous studies on the TCR V usage of human PBMC also found low usage of the V 20 family [39][40].…”

“…The V primers used in this study span the diversity (D) and joining (J) sequences of the TCR-chain [35]. The use of high resolution polyacrylamide gel for separation of the resulting PCR products enabled us to observe multiple bands separated by three base pairs for the products of most V regions [10,38] (Figure 1). This heterogeneity in size was especially evident for the V regions yielding products of low molecular weight, such as V 7, V 13 and V 21, that are best resolved by gel electrophoresis.…”