Many human peripheral VH5-expressing IgM+ B cells display a unique heavy-chain rearrangement.

The immunoscope methodology has proven useful to analyze T-cell repertoires in mice and humans. We adapted it to the analysis of VH chains of human peripheral B cells by setting up a quantification of various VH and JH segments and the profiling of IgM-, IgG-, IgA- and IgE-expressing B cells. We then tested the hypothesis that the human B-cell and T-cell repertoires have a similar diversity of VH and V-beta rearrangements. We studied in more detail the VH5 family because it is not abundantly used, which facilitated the analysis. The data showed that the number of distinct VH5 rearrangements in all samples studied is close to the number of cells in the sample. This contrasts with T cells in which we previously showed that distinct V-beta rearrangements amount to a few percent of the number of T cells because each V-beta chain is on the average paired with approximately 25 alpha chains. Thus, in the VH5 family, the light chains add little quantitative diversity to that produced by the heavy chain alone. Whether this feature can be generalized to other VH chains is discussed.