Guess what, Victor. You have put your finger on one of the great outstanding
(and ignored) questions in immunology. To wit: The weight of evidence suggests
that CTL clonal expansion does not effectively occur in the absence of helper
cells, but how do the helper cells know which CTL's to help. It's easy to
explain with B cells and macrophages, but I have yet to see a logical model
which covers CTL's. Anybody out there got any ideas?
Bob S.
vrdefili at DARWIN.BIO.UCI.EDU (Victor DeFilippis) wrote:
>A potentially stupid question follows. How can Ag's be presented to CD8+
>cells (via MHC-I) for viruses which never infect professional APC's? It's
>my (admittedly naive) impression that in order for peptides to be presented
>on MHC-I molecules the proteins need to be synthesized in the cytoplasm.
>Does this mean that highly tissue specific viruses that totally avoid
>replication in APC's never have a CTL response directed toward them?
>Thanks in advance!
