Immune response in dendritic cell depleted mice.

Abstract

Dendritic cells (DC) are regarded as professional antigen presenting cells capable of efficiently stimulating T cells. In addition, in vitro stimulation of naive T cells can only be achieved efficiently by dendritic cells (DC) (1–3). After antigen administration, DC are the only cells bearing immunogenic fragments and capable of stimulating specific naive T cells in vitro (4, 5). Furthermore, B cells seem dispensable in T cell-dependent immune response in vivo (6, 7). However, as yet there is no direct evidence that DC are absolutely required for the generation of an in vivo primary immune response. A possible way to approach this question is to use an animal model in which DC are depleted. There are yet no natural animal model of a genetic deficit of DC. Recently, a generated relB knock out mice have a DC deficit in lymphoid tissues. However, secondary lymphoid tissues loss their normal structure, with a strong atrophy of splenic white pulp and lymph nodes, rendering complicated the use of this model to study the role of DC in immune response (8, 9).KeywordsDendritic CellThymidine KinasePrimary Immune ResponseProfessional Antigen Present CellThymic AtrophyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.