Analysis of human V H gene repertoire expression in peripheral CD19+ B cells

Using CD19 B-cell selection and polymerase chain reaction-amplified cDNA libraries, we analyzed the peripheral immunoglobulin heavy chain variable repertoire of three healthy adult donors. Here we report that most of the CD19+ circulating B cells expressed unmutated V_H-D-J_H rearrangements. By specific V_H family hybridization, we show that V_H gene family utilization in the periphery roughly corresponds to the complexity of these families in the germline and appears to be relatively constant among the analyzed subjects. However, sequence data of clones picked at random from one IgM cDNA library reveals that in spite of this random utilization, the V_H gene expression in naive circulating B cells is highly biased towards the expression of a limited set of V_H genes. As previously reported by others, this restricted mechanism is also found for the D and J_H segments.The nucleotide sequence data reported in this paper have been submitted to the GenBank/EMBL nucleotide sequence database and have been assigned the accession numbers Z47213-Z47243 and Z47349