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Alloreactivity: An Old Puzzle Revisited
Author(s) -
Nagy Z. A.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of immunology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.934
H-Index - 88
eISSN - 1365-3083
pISSN - 0300-9475
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-3083.2012.02680.x
Subject(s) - major histocompatibility complex , biology , t cell receptor , peptide , t cell , immunology , microbiology and biotechnology , antigen , immune system , biochemistry
Alloreactivity, defined as a strong primary T cell response against allelic variants of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules in the species, has been a long‐standing puzzle in immunology with some of its details remaining unclear up to now. Here I shall provide a historical overview of how our understanding of alloreactivity has evolved and propose an interpretation that considers alloreactivity to be a mixture of four mechanistically distinct prototypes of T cell response, namely, self‐restricted peptide specific, allorestricted peptide specific, alloreactive peptide dependent and alloreactive peptide independent. The relative contribution of each prototype to a given alloresponse is dependent on the extent of disparity (i.e. the number and nature of amino acid substitutions in the docking surface for T cell receptor) between the MHC molecule that the T cell recognizes as self and the stimulating MHC molecule.