BioProject

Children with chronic hepatitis B infections pose serious medical challenges because they eventually become disease-seeding adults and suffer from complications for life. More...

Children with chronic hepatitis B infections pose serious medical challenges because they eventually become disease-seeding adults and suffer from complications for life. Vaccination is the best method to prevent the illness but is ineffective in children carriers. This study uses in-depth analyses of IgG B-cell receptor immune repertoires among carrier and noncarrier siblings to comprehensively characterize infection statuses and vaccine responses. A huge set of sequence-related clones of complementarity determining region 3 (CDR3) on IgG heavy chains indeed presents exclusively among carriers, marking the struggling immune intolerance against the persistent infections. Vaccination on the contrary brings about significant increases of CDR3 diversities in noncarriers but not in carriers who have instead tolerated the vaccine antigen. Clone clusters associated with the immune reactions in noncarriers are identified accordingly. In sum both tolerance and intolerance aspects of IgG immune repertoires have been revealed at resolutions unprecedented ever for children with chronic hepatitis B infections. Less...