Immunodominance

Abstract

The chapters so far have investigated the dynamics between CTL and viral infections, assuming that a single population of CTL fights a population of viruses. The situation is, however, more complex than this (Fig 5.1). The immune system can generate a huge diversity of T cells that are specific to different antigens. A given virus consists of many parts that can all be potentially recognized by CTL. These are called viral epitopes. Therefore, several different CTL can exist that can recognize different epitopes of the same virus. Each of these CTL can become activated and undergo clonal expansion upon infection. Consequently there is not a single CTL response against an infection. Instead, there are multiple CTL responses or clones that fight the same virus population.