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.

Nevertheless, the variation in TCR usage between individuals provides an opportunity for them to have remarkable diversity in their T cell cross-reactivities with diverse pathogens. The demonstration that a memory pool from a single donor could be transferred into three recipients that developed the same epitope-specific T cell response on challenge with VV strongly indicates that it was the unique characteristics (private specificities) of the memory pool that determined the nature of the response and not some random stimulation event on VV challenge that would cause different hosts to differ. Therefore, the stochastic events leading to diversity in a primary immune response seem less of a variable when generating a heterologous immune response from the expanded clones of potentially cross-reactive memory cells.