Lupus and autoreactive immune repertoires

While the detection of molecular mechanisms as well as of genetic disease risk factors rapidly evolves, the systemic diversification of specificity repertoires, which is of obvious relevance for the pathogenesis of human autoimmune diseases, is still badly understood. In this situation, it is increasingly relevant to combine different types of knowledge in order to model the pathogenetic process that leads to autoimmune diseases as a whole, since they are known to depend on complex interactions of a variety of molecular and cellular mechanisms acting on different levels.