Publication Date:
2010-09-08
Description:
B lymphocytes are activated by many different antigens to produce specific antibodies protecting higher organisms from infection. To detect its cognate antigen, each B cell contains up to 120,000 B-cell antigen receptor (BCR) complexes on its cell surface. How these abundant receptors stay silent on resting B cells and how they can be activated by a molecularly diverse set of ligands is poorly understood. Here we show, with the use of a quantitative bifluorescence complementation assay (BiFC), that the BCR has an intrinsic ability to form oligomers on the surface of living cells. A BCR mutant that fails to form oligomers is more active and cannot be expressed stably on the B-cell surface, whereas BiFC-stabilized BCR oligomers are less active and more strongly expressed on the surface. We propose that oligomers are the autoinhibited form of the BCR and that it is the shift from closed BCR oligomers to clustered monomers that drives B-cell activation in a way that is independent of the structural input from the antigen.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Yang, Jianying -- Reth, Michael -- England -- Nature. 2010 Sep 23;467(7314):465-9. doi: 10.1038/nature09357. Epub 2010 Sep 5.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Centre for Biological Signalling Studies BIOSS, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, Department of Molecular Immunology, Faculty of Biology, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg and Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology, Stubeweg 51, 79108 Freiburg, Germany.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20818374" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
B-Lymphocytes/cytology/immunology/*metabolism
;
Cell Line
;
Drosophila melanogaster/cytology
;
Immunoglobulin D/genetics/immunology
;
Lymphocyte Activation/immunology
;
*Protein Multimerization/immunology
;
Receptors, Antigen, B-Cell/antagonists &
;
inhibitors/*chemistry/immunology/*metabolism
Print ISSN:
0028-0836
Electronic ISSN:
1476-4687
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
