Isolation, Characterization, and Molecular Modeling of a Rheumatoid Factor from a Hepatitis C Virus Infected Patient with Sjögren's Syndrome

Lee, Yu-Ching; Tsai, Keng-Chang; Leu, Sy-Jye; Wang, Tuan-Jen; Liu, Chia-Yu; Yang, Yi-Yuan

T 107 The sequences of putative germline counterpart were included for comparison. Sequence gaps were introduced to maximize alignment as indicated by blank spaces. The boundaries of framework region (FR) and complementarity-determining region (CDR) were indicated above each germline gene sequences. serum sample from a patient with Sjögren's syndrome revealed the presence of IgG RFs (Figure 2 ). Although phagederived Fabs may represent the artefacts of recombination of H and L chains during library construction, the characteristic of isolated RFL11 could still be a hint to verify the existence of high affinity RF in patients with Sjögren's syndrome. Our data suggest that IgG type RFs may occur in some patients with Sjögren's syndrome and that such IgG type RFs may have binding affinities higher than those of IgM or IgG RFs isolated from other autoimmune diseases [12, 13, 26] .