Partial versus productive immunoglobulin heavy locus rearrangements in chronic lymphocytic leukemia: implications for B-cell receptor stereotypy.

ABSTRACT: The frequent occurrence of stereotyped heavy complementarity-determining region 3 (VH CDR3) sequences among unrelated cases with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is widely taken as evidence for antigen selection. Stereotyped VH CDR3 sequences are often defined by the selective association of certain immunoglobulin heavy diversity (IGHD) genes in specific reading frames with certain immunoglobulin heavy joining (IGHJ ) genes. To gain insight into the mechanisms underlying VH CDR3 restrictions and also determine the developmental stage when restrictions in VH CDR3 are imposed, we analyzed partial IGHD-IGHJ rearrangements (D-J) in 829 CLL cases and compared the productively rearranged D-J joints (that is, in-frame junctions without junctional stop codons) to (a) the productive immunoglobuli

SUBMITTER: Tsakou E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3276399 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature