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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2016 Jan 1.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Immunol. 2015 May 25;16(7):755–765. doi: 10.1038/ni.3175

Figure 7. Serological consequence and cellular derivation of expanded ASC clones in SLE.

Figure 7

(a) Proteomic analysis of affinity-purified serum 9G4 antibodies from SLE-3. Multiple proteolytic digestions resulted in spectra of overlapping peptides spanning the HCDR3 sequence ARAPGLDRDYYYYYYMDV. (b) As illustrated in the alignment, this HCDR3 sequence and two linked full-length VH sequences (separated by a single point mutation) also identified by proteomics, were a perfect match for two ASC sequences identified by NGS in the same blood sample. As illustrated in Supplemental Figure 6, this sequence was consistently found in longitudinal serum and ASC samples. (c) IgTree-based phylogenetic analysis was used to localize the ASC origin of the serum antibody within the largest VH4-34 clone present in SLE 3 at the early flare time point. The arrows mark the exact sequences found by proteomic analysis of patient serum.