UMMS Affiliation

Deparment of Pathology

Publication Date

2021-12-16

Document Type

Article

Disciplines

Immunology of Infectious Disease | Infectious Disease | Microbiology | Virus Diseases

Abstract

T follicular helper (Tfh) cells are the conventional drivers of protective, germinal center (GC)-based antiviral antibody responses. However, loss of Tfh cells and GCs has been observed in patients with severe COVID-19. As T cell-B cell interactions and immunoglobulin class switching still occur in these patients, non-canonical pathways of antibody production may be operative during SARS-CoV-2 infection. We found that both Tfh-dependent and -independent antibodies were induced against SARS-CoV-2 infection, SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, and influenza A virus infection. Even though Tfh-independent antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 had evidence of reduced somatic hypermutation, they were still high-affinity, durable, and reactive against diverse spike-derived epitopes and were capable of neutralizing both homologous SARS-CoV-2 and the B.1.351 (beta) variant of concern. Indeed, we found by epitope mapping and BCR sequencing that Tfh cells focused the B cell response and therefore, in the absence of Tfh cells, a more diverse clonal repertoire was maintained. These data support an alternative pathway for the induction of B cell responses during viral infection that enables effective, neutralizing antibody production to complement traditional GC-derived antibodies that might compensate for GCs damaged by viral inflammation.

Keywords

Immunology, COVID-19, antibodies, T follicular helper (Tfh) cells, germinal center (GC)-based antiviral antibody responses, B cell responses

Rights and Permissions

Copyright © 2021, American Association for the Advancement of Science. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

DOI of Published Version

10.1126/sciimmunol.abl5652

Source

Chen JS, Chow RD, Song E, Mao T, Israelow B, Kamath K, Bozekowski J, Haynes WA, Filler RB, Menasche BL, Wei J, Alfajaro MM, Song W, Peng L, Carter L, Weinstein JS, Gowthaman U, Chen S, Craft J, Shon JC, Iwasaki A, Wilen CB, Eisenbarth SC. High-affinity, neutralizing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 can be made without T follicular helper cells. Sci Immunol. 2021 Dec 16:eabl5652. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34914544.

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Journal/Book/Conference Title

Science immunology

Comments

Full author list omitted for brevity. For the full list of authors, see article.

This article is based on a previously available preprint in bioRxiv.

Related Resources

Link to Article in PubMed

PubMed ID

34914544

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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