Patients with Multiple Myeloma Develop SOX2-Specific Autoantibodies after Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation
Figure 1
(a) RT-PCR analysis of SOX2 expression normalized to GAPDH in human tissues. BM from MM patients (), healthy donors (), myeloma cell lines (), and 20 human tissues () was screened for SOX2 expression. Aqua dest. and non-reverse-transcribed mRNA were used as negative controls. 20 organs were tested for the presence of contaminating DNA. The resulting copy numbers (reverse-transcriptase-free) were normalized to GAPDH copy number of the respective tissue (cDNA). The mean value of all reverse-transcriptase-free results was calculated and included as the reverse-transcriptase-free (RT-free) condition. (b) FACS analysis of three MM patients’ BM, three BM of healthy donors, and three peripheral blood samples of healthy donors for SOX2 expression in gated CD138+ plasma cells. One BM sample (3) was found negative for SO2 protein expression. SOX2 expression was also found in 10 different myeloma cell lines. Isotype antibodies served as negative control for SOX2 expression. (c) Correlation analysis of SOX2 expression and percentage of plasma cells in the BM of MM patients. No significant association between SOX2 expression and the amount of plasma cells was found (). HD: healthy donor; MM: multiple myeloma; BM: bone marrow; PB: peripheral blood.
