The epsilon toxin, produced by Clostridium perfringens, is responsible for enterotoxemia in ruminants and is a potential bioterrorism agent. In the present study, 15 regions of the toxin were recognized by antibodies present in the serum, with different immunodominance scales, and may be antigen determinants that can be used to formulate subunit vaccines.

The concept of immunodominance during infection involves the generation of a focused immune response to a few of the many possible pathogen-derived antigenic determinants. The development of technical approaches to identify these antigens and predictive algorithms for major histocompatibility complex (MHC)– binding peptides have proven key in starting to dissect these events. When combined with...

The recent emergence of a novel H7N9 influenza A virus (IAV) causing severe human infections in China raises concerns about a possible pandemic. The lack of pre-existing neutralizing antibodies in the broader population highlights the potential protective role of IAV-specific CD8(+) cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) memory specific for epitopes conserved between H7N9 and previously encountered IAVs....

We analyzed the CD4 T-cell immunodominance of the response to a model antigen (Ag), MalE, when delivered by an attenuated strain of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (SL3261*pMalE). Compared to purified MalE Ag administered with adjuvant, the mapping of the peptide-specific proliferative responses showed qualitative differences when we used the Salmonella vehicle. We observed the disappea...

CTL responses to pathogens are generally limited to a minor fraction of the many potential antigenic determinants encoded by the corresponding genomes, a phenomenon termed immunodominance (1). Both in studies in model systems using inbred mice and in humans, immunodominance has been shown to focus the CTL response to even large viruses to a limited number of determinants often presented in the ...

Previous theoretical work has suggested that efficient virus control or clearance requires antigen-independent persistence of memory cytotoxic T lymphocyte precursors (CTLp), and that failure to generate such memory CTLp can result in persistent infection and eventual loss of virus control. Here we use mathematical models to investigate the relationship between virus control, the clonal composi...