Spleen B cell repertoires of wild-type and lambda5-deficient mice

The pre-B cell receptor (pre-BCR), consisting of the mu heavy chain (mHC) and the surrogate light chain (SLC, Vpre-B and lambda-5), plays important roles during B cell development. The formation of the pre-BCR, which enables the nascent immunoglobulin HC to associate with the SLC, is considered a prerequisite for B cell development. However, a significant number of peripheral mature (leaky) B cells exist in SLC-deficient mice. These leaky B cells develop in the absence of pre-BCR and do not undergo the pre-BCR checkpoint. The antibody repertoires of leaky B cells thus reflect the absence of pre-BCR function. To investigate how the absence of the pre-BCR is circumvented by these leaky-B cells and examine the effect of the pre-BCR checkpoint on the antibody system, we analyzed the antibody repertoires of lambda-5_deficient mice using next-generation sequencing.