Sponsor
This work was supported in part by Public Health Service grants AG023664, AI082196, an ONPRC pilot project grant, and P51 OD 011092.
Published In
Nature Communications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-2017
Subjects
B cells, Antigen-antibody reactions, Immunoglobulins, Plasma cells
Abstract
Pre-existing serum antibodies play an important role in vaccine-mediated protection against infection but the underlying mechanisms of immune memory are unclear. Clinical studies indicate that antigen-specific antibody responses can be maintained for many years, leading to theories that reactivation/differentiation of memory B cells into plasma cells is required to sustain long-term antibody production. Here, we present a decade-long study in which we demonstrate site-specific survival of bone marrow-derived plasma cells and durable antibody responses to multiple virus and vaccine antigens in rhesus macaques for years after sustained memory B cell depletion. Moreover, BrdU+ cells with plasma cell morphology can be detected for 10 years after vaccination/BrdU administration, indicating that plasma cells may persist for a prolonged period of time in the absence of cell division. On the basis of these results, long-lived plasma cells represent a key cell population responsible for long-term antibody production and serological memory.
DOI
10.1038/s41467-017-01901-w
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/33689
Citation Details
Hammarlund, E., Thomas, A., Amanna, I. J., Holden, L. A., Slayden, O. D., Park, B., ... & Slifka, M. K. (2017). Plasma cell survival in the absence of B cell memory. Nature communications, 8(1), 1-11.
Description
Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
© The Author(s) 2017