Immune repertoire: Revealing the “real-time” adaptive immune response in autoimmune diseases

Abstract

The diversity of the immune repertoire (IR) enables the human immune system to distinguish multifarious antigens (Ags) that humans may encounter throughout life. At the same time, bias or abnormalities in the IR also pay a contribution to the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases. Rapid advancements in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technology have ushered in a new era of immune studies, revealing novel molecules and pathways that might result in autoimmunity. In the field of IR, HTS can monitor the immune response status and identify disease-specific immune repertoires. In this review, we summarize updated progress on the mechanisms of the IR and current related studies on four autoimmune diseases, particularly focusing on systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). These autoimmune diseases can exhibit slightly or significantly skewed IRs and provide novel insights that inform our comprehending of disease pathogenesis and provide potential targets for diagnosis and treatment.

Keywords:

• Immune repertoire
• BCR
• TCR
• autoimmune diseases
• SLE

Author contributions

Meiyu Wu wrote the review, Ming Zhao conducted editing, Haijing Wu and Qianjin Lu chose the topic, designed the structure and revised the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 81972943, No. 81830097], Hunan Talent Young Investigator [No. 2019RS2012], Hunan Outstanding Young Investigator [No. 2020JJ2055], and Hunan Urgency Project [2020SK3005] and CAMS Innovation Fund for Medical Sciences (CIFMS) [2019-I2M-5-033].