Private specificities of CD8 T cell responses control patterns of heterologous immunity

Kim, Sung-Kwon; Cornberg, Markus; Wang, Xiaoting Z.; Chen, Hong D.; Selin, Liisa K.; Welsh, Raymond M.

To systematically address this issue, we examined the fate of A11R 198-specific CD8 T cells before and after heterologous virus infection using a PBL longitudinal analysis, as in Fig. 1. Fig. 4 B shows that low levels (0.2-0.5%) of A11R 198-specific CD8 T cells were present in LCMV-immune PBLs. However, upon VV infection (day 12), only some of the LCMV-immune mice (mouse nos. 4, 7, 10, 12, 13, and 19) showed significant expansions of T cells specific to the cross-reactive VV epitope, whereas others did not (mouse nos. 1, 2, 3, and 10 others not depicted; Fig. 4 B) . Altogether, longitudinal analysis experiments revealed that 6 out of 19 LCMV-immune mice challenged with VV made relatively strong (Ͼ1.5% of CD8 T cells) responses to the A11R 198 peptide. In these experiments, four of the A11R 298 responders (mouse nos. 4, 7, 10, and 13) also responded to the GP33/34 epitope, three (mouse nos. 10, 12, and 19) responded to the NP205 epitope, and one (mouse no. 12) responded to the GP118 epitope (unpublished data).