BANK1 and systemic sclerosis: Similarly, the branchpoint-site single-nucleotide polymorphisms rs17266594 and rs10516487 in the B cell scaffold protein with ankyrin repeats 1 (BANK1) gene have been testified to be associated with various autoimmune diseases including SLE (Guan et al., 2011), RA (Orozco et al., 2009), and SSc (Rueda et al., 2010).