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Science 12 November 1999:
Vol. 286. no. 5443, p. 1253
DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5443.1253j
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This Week in Science

Vaccination enables an immune response to be mounted quickly upon exposure to the pathogen. This accelerated response is a result of a "memory" being established in the appropriate lymphocytes. It has been thought that T cell memory persistence requires the T cell's antigen receptor to either see antigen or at least major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins. Swain et al. (p. 1381) studied the memory requirements of CD4 T cells, and Murali-Krishna et al. (p. 1377) studied those of CD8 T cells. Neither subset requires MHC proteins or antigen to be maintained. An understanding of what generates such memory and how it is maintained will lay the groundwork for the development of more efficacious vaccination strategies (see the news story by Hagmann).




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