Plasma from patients with anti-glomerular basement membrane disease could recognize microbial peptides

Infection has long been suspected as a trigger of autoimmune diseases, and molecular mimicry mechanism was hypothesized in this study. Microbe originated peptides were searched from the Uniprot database based on a previous defined critical amino acid motif within α3129-150, isoleucine137, tryptophan140, glycine142, phenylalanine 143 and phenylalanine 145. 23826 microbial peptides were identified using our searching strategy, among which seven...