Topic summary
Autoantigen
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Antigen.
Autoantigens
An autoantigen or self-antigen is usually a self-protein or protein complex (and sometimes DNA or RNA) that is recognized by the immune system of patients with a specific autoimmune disease. Under normal conditions, these self-proteins should not be the target of the immune system, but in autoimmune diseases, their associated T cells are not deleted and instead attack.