carried out in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. The protocol was approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments of the University of Tokyo. All surgery was performed under sodium pentobarbital anesthesia, and all efforts were made to minimize suffering. Antibodies Antibodies used in this study are as follows: AIM; FLAG; c-Myc; HA; F4/80; Hoechst 33342; mouse IL-6, mouse C1q; a1antitrypsin. Secondary antibodies: Cy3 goat anti-rat IgG antibody; Alexa Fluo 488 chicken anti-rabbit IgG antibody. For ELISA, antibodies to measure human IgM, mouse IgM, and mouse IgG were purchased from BETHYL laboratories. Biacore Analysis A Novel Strategy to Increase Circulating AIM concentrated and the resolving buffer was exchanged to PBS using Amicon Ultra 10k. Immunoprecipitation 30 ml of mouse serum was incubated with 10 ml of anti-FLAG antibody conjugated affinity gel in 200 ml of total volume at 4uC overnight. The precipitates were washed with wash buffer for 5 times, and resolved in 20 ml of 2xSDS sample buffer containing methanol. Samples were heated at 95uC for 5 minutes, and loaded on SDS-PAGE for immunoblotting. Histology The anesthetized mice were perfused with 4% paraformaldehyde in PBS, and the epididymal white adipose tissue was post-fixed in 4% PFA/PBS at 4uC overnight. The tissues were then treated in 30% sucorese at 4uC overnight. The specimens were embedded in Tissue-TEK O.C.T. compound, and 14 mm sections were made using a cryostat microtome. Histological analysis was performed using a confocal microscope. Results AIM Bound to IgM-Fc In a previous report, we suggested that AIM may bind to the Fc portion of IgM, as AIM associates with different monoclonal IgM clones regardless of the type of the variable region. To determine whether AIM harbours a significant binding region recognizing IgM-Fc, here we employed the Biacore system. As schematized in Fig. 1A, the free constant region of the IgM heavy chain consists of three out of four conserved domains; CH1 is associated with the IgM light chain through an S-S boundary, and the CH2-CH4 region is free of the light chain. Like other types of immunoglobulin, two sets of the heavy-light chains form a dimer linked at the cysteine within CH2. Under physiologic conditions, IgM forms a pentamer involving two S-S boundaries in CH3 and CH4. Because the pentameric form of IgM is not suitable for the Biacore analysis, we generated a monomeric IgM by adding a Myc Tag at the C-terminus, which interfered with the formation of the pentamer. Human rAIM was immobilized on a sensor chip surface, and varying concentrations of the hFc-Myc were injected across the surface. Changes in the index of refraction at the surface where the binding interaction occurs were detected and recorded as resonance units. As shown in Fig. 1C, curves were generated from the RU trace and were evaluated by fitting algorithms that compare the raw data to well-defined binding models. These fits allowed determination of the apparent affinity of the binding between AIM and the synthesized IgM-Fc. The resulting association rate constant was 2.056104, the dissociation rate constant was 3.1561023, and the dissociation-association rate constant was 1.5361027. Creation of a Human IgM-Fc Pentamer and PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19656570 its Association with AIM Having MedChemExpress 181223-80-3 confirmed that AIM bound to Fc with sufficient 
affinity, we then created recombinant human IgM-F
Comments are closed.