Apoptotic marginal zone deletion of anti-Sm/ribonucleoprotein B cells

作者：Kishi Yusuke; Higuchi Tetsuya; Phoon Shirly; Sakamaki Yasuo; Kamiya Koki; Riemekasten Gabriela; Akiyoshi Kazunari; Weigert Martin G^*; Tsubata Takeshi

来源：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012, 109(20): 7811-7816.

DOI：10.1073/pnas.1204509109

• peripheral tolerance
• lupus-related autoantibody
• marginal zone B cells

CD40L is excessively produced in both human and murine lupus and plays a role in lupus pathogenesis. To address how excess CD40L induces autoantibody production, we crossed CD40L-transgenic mice with the anti-DNAH-chain transgenic mouse lines 3H9 and 56R, well-characterized models for studying B-cell tolerance to nuclear antigens. Excess CD40L did not induce autoantibody production in 3H9 mice in which anergy maintains self-tolerance, nor did it perturb central tolerance, including deletion and receptor editing, of anti-DNA B cells in 56R mice. In contrast, CD40L/56R mice restored a large number of marginal zone (MZ) B cells reactive to Sm/ribonucleoprotein (RNP) and produced autoantibody, whereas these B cells were deleted by apoptosis in MZ of 56R mice. Thus, excess CD40L efficiently blocked tolerance of Sm/RNP-reactive MZ B cells, leading to production of anti-Sm/RNP antibody implicated in the pathogenesis of lupus. These results suggest that self-reactive B cells such as anti-Sm/RNP B cells, which somehow escape tolerance in the bone marrow and migrate to MZ, are tolerized by apoptotic deletion in MZ and that a break in this tolerance may play a role in the pathogenesis of lupus.

• 出版日期2012-5-15