Skewness of TCR Vβ of peripheral blood and synovial fluid of patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

To date, the complete mechanism of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) remain unclear, T cells have been proposed to play an important role in the disease initiation and progression. Presently, some researchers have reported that there were skewed TCR Vβ in different samples of experimental animals or RA patients, such as in the peripheral blood, joints or synovial fluid, however, most of the results were not coincident or even conflict with each other. In this article, with real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR with DNA melting curving technique, we detected the bias of TCR Vβ of RA patients, and found that although most of TCR Vβ usage were different between peripheral blood and synovial fluid, the overview of all the Vβ skewness was similar between the two samples.