Decreased somatic hypermutation induces an impaired peripheral B cell tolerance checkpoint

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Abstract

Patients with mutations in AICDA, which encodes activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID), display an impaired peripheral B cell tolerance. AID mediates class-switch recombination (CSR) and somatic hypermutation (SHM) in B cells, but the mechanism by which AID prevents the accumulation of autoreactive B cells in blood is unclear. Here, we analyzed B cell tolerance in AID-deficient patients, patients with autosomal dominant AID mutations (AD-AID), asymptomatic AICDA heterozygotes (AID^+/–), and patients with uracil N-glycosylase (UNG) deficiency, which impairs CSR but not SHM. The low frequency of autoreactive mature naive B cells in UNG-deficient patients resembled that of healthy subjects, revealing that impaired CSR does not interfere with the peripheral B cell tolerance checkpoint. In contrast, we observed decreased frequencies of SHM in memory B cells from AD-AID patients and AID^+/– subjects, who were unable to prevent the accumulation of autoreactive mature naive B cells. In addition, the individuals with AICDA mutations, but not UNG-deficient patients, displayed Tregs with defective suppressive capacity that correlated with increases in circulating T follicular helper cells and enhanced cytokine production. We conclude that SHM, but not CSR, regulates peripheral B cell tolerance through the production of mutated antibodies that clear antigens and prevent sustained interleukin secretions that interfere with Treg function.

Authors

Tineke Cantaert, Jean-Nicolas Schickel, Jason M. Bannock, Yen-Shing Ng, Christopher Massad, Fabien R. Delmotte, Natsuko Yamakawa, Salome Glauzy, Nicolas Chamberlain, Tuure Kinnunen, Laurence Menard, Aubert Lavoie, Jolan E. Walter, Luigi D. Notarangelo, Julie Bruneau, Waleed Al-Herz, Sara Sebnem Kilic, Hans D. Ochs, Charlotte Cunningham-Rundles, Mirjam van der Burg, Taco W. Kuijpers, Sven Kracker, Hideo Kaneko, Yujin Sekinaka, Shigeaki Nonoyama, Anne Durandy, Eric Meffre