Glycosylation of immunoglobulins was suggested to be important in the etiology of several rheumatoid diseases. Most previous studies focused on terminal galactose and N-Acetylglucosamine residues, but recently we showed that in juvenile chronic arthritis there is more than two-fold increased in fucose. The objective of this study was to determine fucosylation of IgG heavy chains in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that is similar, but still significantly different from juvenile chronic arthritis. IgG was purified from sera of 29 RA patients and 17 matching controls using ammonium sulfate precipitation and ion exchange. Heavy chains were separated by denaturing polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and their fucosylation analysed using fucose – specific UEA I lectin. We have found that fucose was approximately 40% increased in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. It is interesting that though the statistical significance of this difference was very high (p = 0,00047), this increase was not as prominent as in juvenile chronic arthritis.

Biology