Expression of activation-induced cytidine deaminase splicing variants in patients with ankylosing spondylitis

AbstractTo investigate the expression patterns of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) variants in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) and examine their clinical implications, we isolated PBMCs from healthy controls (HC, n = 33) and patients with AS (n = 62), and measured mRNA expression of AID variants and translesion synthesis (TLS) polymerases using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. The proportion of patients with AS in whom AID splicing variant (sv) 2 was expressed was significantly higher than that of HC (p = .031). 80.7% of AS patients were treated with tumour necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi). Significantly higher proportion of the TNFi-treated group expressed sv2 compared to the TNF-naive group (p = .037). And we compared the level of AID variants expression between the TNFi-treated group and the TNF-naive group. The expression levels of AID full-length (FL) and sv1 were significantly lower in the TNFi-treated group than the...