The influenza virus-specific CTL immunodominance hierarchy in mice is determined by the relative frequency of high-avidity T cells

Abstract

Virus-specific CTL responses typically fall into reproducible hierarchies with particular epitopes eliciting either immunodominant or subdominant responses after viral challenge. The recently acquired capacity to directly enumerate naive CTL precursors (CTLps) in both mice and humans has implicated CTLp frequency as a key predictor of immune response magnitude after Ag challenge. However, recent studies have indicated that naive CTLp frequencies do not necessarily predict the size of the Agdriven response, indicating an important role for differential CTLp recruitment and/or expansion. This study characterizes the early emergence of various influenza epitope-specific CTL responses at multipl..