Wang C C, Hwang L H, Yang P M, Chiang B L, Chen P J, Chen D S
Hepatitis Research Center, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Republic of China.
J Med Virol. 1995 Jan;45(1):24-8. doi: 10.1002/jmv.1890450105.
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection frequently causes chronic hepatitis and lack of virus clearance in these patients. In addition, many patients infected by HCV also present with hypergammaglobulinemia in the early stage of chronic infection. These observations raise a possible viral superantigen effect induced by HCV, because viral superantigen found in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or in replication of defective murine leukemia virus (MuLV) is associated with T-cell dysfunction and polyclonal activation of B cells. The possibility was investigated of whether HCV encodes any superantigen by analyzing the usage of T-cell receptor (TCR) from the peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBL) of patients with chronic hepatitis C. Two groups, one with hypergammaglobulinemia and the other without hypergammaglobulinemia, were studied for the usage of TCR beta chain by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) analysis. It was found that all genes of V beta variable chain were used in the PBL of these patients. Furthermore, there was no significant difference of the TCR expression pattern between these two groups, nor a complete deletion of a particular T-cell subset in either group. These results do not provide evidence for HCV superantigen, but indicate that the TCR usage in the patients was neither defective nor biased.
丙型肝炎病毒（HCV）感染常导致慢性肝炎，且这些患者体内病毒难以清除。此外，许多感染HCV的患者在慢性感染早期还会出现高球蛋白血症。这些观察结果提示HCV可能诱导了病毒超抗原效应，因为在人类免疫缺陷病毒（HIV）或缺陷型鼠白血病病毒（MuLV）复制过程中发现的病毒超抗原与T细胞功能障碍及B细胞多克隆激活有关。通过分析慢性丙型肝炎患者外周血淋巴细胞（PBL）的T细胞受体（TCR）使用情况，研究了HCV是否编码任何超抗原。采用逆转录聚合酶链反应（RT-PCR）分析，对两组患者进行研究，一组有高球蛋白血症，另一组无高球蛋白血症，以检测TCRβ链的使用情况。结果发现，这些患者的PBL中使用了所有Vβ可变链基因。此外，两组之间TCR表达模式无显著差异，两组中也没有特定T细胞亚群的完全缺失。这些结果并未提供HCV超抗原的证据，但表明患者的TCR使用既无缺陷也无偏向。
