Description:

Microbiology-Immunology Seminar Series

"The human immune system has some significant advantages over mouse models in terms of understanding the effects of genetics versus the environment and in understanding how the T cell repertoire deals with the diversity of pathogens and other microbial exposures. In the case of nature vs nuture, we have performed an extensive analysis of 210 twin pairs and find that most of the variation in immune biomarkers is driven by non-heritable influences, which tend to increase with age and exposure to particular pathogens/vaccinations (influenza, CMV) (Brodin et al., Cell 2015). We also find that CMV infection correlates with a superior antibody response to a flu vaccine in young adults and is protective for flu infection in mice (Furman et al., Sci.Trans.Med. 2015). Inaddition, we have analyzed the immune systems of young children in Bangladesh and compared them with children in Palo Alto of the same age and find much more immunological activity in the former cohort, which has implications for the “hygiene hypothesis”. We have also investigated aspects of the human ab T cell repertoire and find that self-specific T cells are abundant in healthy individuals, although somewhat reduced in frequency in the presence of the cognate antigen (Yu et al., Immunity 2015). This suggests that the repertoire is broad and comprehensive, with few if any “holes”. This is consistent with infectious diseases being the principal evolutionary driver of adaptive immunity. Lastly we used peptide-HLA tetramer specific human T cells to develop a way to analyze TCR sequences both known and unknown, such that we can judge the diversity of an ab T cell response, which typically correlates with its effectiveness (Glanville et al., in prep.)."

Mark Davis, PhD

Stanford University School of Medicine

Host: Dr. Melissa Brown