Temporal stability and molecular persistence of the bone marrow plasma cell antibody repertoire

Gabriel C. Wu, Nai-Kong V. Cheung, George Georgiou, Edward M. Marcotte () and Gregory C. Ippolito ()
Additional contact information
Gabriel C. Wu: Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology, University of Texas at Austin
Nai-Kong V. Cheung: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York
George Georgiou: University of Texas at Austin
Edward M. Marcotte: Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology, University of Texas at Austin
Gregory C. Ippolito: University of Texas at Austin

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Plasma cells in human bone marrow (BM) are thought to be responsible for sustaining lifelong immunity, but its underlying basis is controversial. Here we use high-throughput sequence analysis of the same individual across 6.5 years to show that the BM plasma cell immunoglobulin heavy chain repertoire is remarkably stable over time. We find a nearly static bias in individual and combinatorial gene usage across time. Analysis of a second donor corroborates these observations. We also report the persistence of numerous BM plasma cell clonotypes (∼2%) identifiable at all points assayed across 6.5 years, supporting a model of serological memory based upon intrinsic longevity of human plasma cells. Donors were adolescents who completely recovered from neuroblastoma prior to the start of this study. Our work will facilitate differentiation between healthy and diseased antibody repertoires, by serving as a point of comparison with future deep-sequencing studies involving immune intervention.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13838 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms13838

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms13838

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().