International Immunology Advance Access originally published online on September 19, 2007
International Immunology 2007 19(10):1157-1164; doi:10.1093/intimm/dxm080
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T cells specific to hapten–carrier but not to carrier alone assist in the production of anti-hapten and anti-carrier antibodies
1 Division of Structural Immunology
2 Division of Immunobiology, Research Institute for Biological Sciences, Tokyo University of Science, Yamazaki 2669, Noda, Chiba 278-0022, Japan
3 Present address: Department of Biochemistry, Sapporo Medical University School of Medicine, South-1 West-17, Chuo-ku, Sapporo 060-8556, Japan
4 Present address: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8566, Japan
5 Present address: Department of Cellular Macromolecule Chemistry, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto Prefectural University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8522, Japan
Correspondence to: T. Azuma; E-mail: tazuma{at}rs.noda.tus.ac.jp
We examined the immune response of Balb/c mice to antigens prepared by conjugating 2-phenyloxazolone (phOx) to a foreign protein, ovalbumin (OVA), or a self-protein, mouse serum albumin (MSA), in order to study how these chemical modifications would affect immune recognition. We found that anti-OVA antibodies and CD4+ T cells produced by OVA immunization reacted with OVA as well as with phOx–OVA. Anti-phOx antibodies were produced by phOx–OVA immunization and, interestingly, T cells from these mice reacted only with phOx–OVA but not with the intact OVA. These results suggested that the classical model of hapten–carrier immunization, in which B cells specific to hapten are activated with assistance from T cells specific to a carrier protein, might not be a major route for production of anti-hapten antibodies in hapten–carrier immunization. Furthermore, phOx–MSA immunization induced production of anti-phOx antibodies, which could not be accounted for in terms of the assistance of carrier-specific T cells because of the absence of MSA-specific T cells. Therefore, we proposed a new model in which anti-hapten B cells are assisted by T cells specific to the haptenated carrier.
Keywords: antigenicity, B lymphocyte, hapten–carrier immunization, T lymphocyte, TD antigen
Transmitting editor: K. Okumura
Received 29 July 2006, accepted 19 June 2007.