Title

The privacy of T cell memory to viruses

UMMS Affiliation

Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; Department of Pathology

Publication Date

2006-10-20

Document Type

Article

Disciplines

Life Sciences | Medicine and Health Sciences

Abstract

T cell responses to viral infections can mediate either protective immunity or damaging immunopathology. Viral infections induce the proliferation of T cells specific for viral antigens and cause a loss in the number of T cells with other specificities. In immunologically naive hosts, viruses will induce T cell responses that, dependent on the MHC, recognize a distinct hierarchy of virus-encoded T cell epitopes. This hierarchy can change if the host has previously encountered another pathogen that elicited a memory pool ofT cells specific to a cross-reactive epitope. This heterologous immunity can deviate the normal immune response and result in either beneficial or harmful effects on the host. Each host has a unique T cell repertoire caused by the random DNA rearrangement that created it, so the specific T cells that create the epitope hierarchy differ between individuals. This "private specificity" seems of little significance in the T cell response of a naive host to infection, but it is of profound importance under conditions of heterologous immunity, where a small subset of a cross-reactive memory pool may expand and dominate a response. Examples are given of how the private specificities of immune responses under conditions of heterologous immunity influence the pathogenesis of murine and human viral infections.

Source

Curr Top Microbiol Immunol. 2006;311:117-53.

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Current topics in microbiology and immunology

Related Resources

Link to Article in PubMed

PubMed ID

17048707

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