Human colorectal cancer cells frequently express IgG and display unique Ig repertoire

Figure 2 The restricted VDJ patterns and distribution of immunoglobulin heavy chain in cancer and normal cells. A: V-J-CDR3 map of immunoglobulin heavy chain (IgH) expressed in normal B cells[26], colon cancer cells and normal epithelial cells. Each rectangle represents a unique V-J-CDR3 nucleotide sequence and the size denotes its relative frequency. Colors for each rectangle are chosen randomly and, thus, do not match between plots; B: The distribution of V_Hs expressed in cancer and normal epithelial cells; C: The utilizations of V_Hs in cancer and normal epithelial cells. The order of V_Hs on the X-axis corresponds to its position on a chromosome; D: Utilizations of 7 V_H and 6 J_H families in cancer and normal cells from patients with colon cancer (red and blue columns), and B cells from peripheral blood of a healthy donor[28] (orange columns). Small horizontal lines indicate the mean ± SEM. All data comparing cancer with normal cells were determined by the two-tailed unpaired Student’s t-test and none of the differences were significant (P > 0.05). The percentage of V_H and J_H families in B cells (D) was derived from the data from other sources[28]; thus, statistical analysis was not performed.