| Research Abstract |
Recent advances in knowledge of crystal structures of MHC class II molecules has advanced understanding of the molecular basis for interactions between peptides and HLA class II molecules. Polymorphism of HLA class II molecules influences structures of peptides bound to HLA class II molecules. To elucidate mechanisms for statistical association between particular HLA class II alleles and susceptibility to autoimmune diseases, it is important to identify self peptides presented by disease-susceptible HLA class II molecules and triggering disease-causative autoreactive T cells. In this study, we tryed to identify self-peptides triggering autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, insulin autoimmune syndrome, insulin dependent diabetes mellitus and infant-onset myasthenia gravis. Susceptibility to all of these diseases in the Japanese population are known to be strongly associated with particular HLA-DR-DQ haplotypes unique to Asians, and clinical features of some of these diseas
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es are different between Caucasians and Asians including Japanese. We investigated differences in binding-peptide motifs between disease susceptible and non-susceptible HLA class II molecules and predicted candidates of autoimmune self-peptides carrying binding-motifs to disease-susceptible HLA class II molecules. Indeed the major epitope for insulin-autoreactive CD4^+T cell was successfully identified by this strategy. We also found heterogeneity in immunogenetic background between Western type and Asian type of multiple sclerosis. Our data indicated that our strategy is useful to identify autoimmune self-peptides, and it is suggested that not only disease-susceptible HLA class II but also self-peptides causing diseases are different between Caucasians and Asians. These differences may well correlate to different clinical manifestations of diseases between the two ethnic groups. Recently it was found that T cell respose to antigen was not an on/off phenomenon, and altered T cell responses to altered peptide ligands were reported in mouse. We investigated responses of human T cell clones specific to non-self peptides to large panels of analogue peptides to find frequent alterations of T cell responses. This basic knowledg of altered human T cell responses may be useful for manipulation by altered peptide ligands of human pathogenic autoreactive T cell responses. Less
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