MHC Class II Tetramers

MHC class II tetramers.

MHC class II tetramers have emerged as an important tool for characterization of the specificity and phenotype of CD4 T cell immune responses, useful in a large variety of disease and vaccine studies. Issues of specific T cell frequency, biodistribution, and avidity, coupled with the large genetic diversity of potential class II restriction elements, require targeted experimental design. Transl...

Allergic and Nonallergic Individuals Using MHC Class II Peptide Tetramers

Direct enumeration of Borrelia-reactive CD4 T cells ex vivo by using MHC class II tetramers.

We characterized antigen-specific CD4(+) T cells in six patients with treatment-resistant Lyme arthritis, using an HLA-DRB1*0401 major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II tetramer covalently loaded with OspA(164-175), an immunodominant epitope of Borrelia burgdorferi. Direct analysis of OspA-tetramer binding CD4(+) cells in patients expressing the HLA-DRB1*0401 allele revealed frequencies...

Flow Cytometric Clinical Immunomonitoring Using Peptide–MHC Class II Tetramers: Optimization of Methods and Protocol Development

With the advent of novel strategies to induce tolerance in autoimmune and autoimmune-like conditions, clinical trials of antigen-specific tolerizing immunotherapy have become a reality. Besides safety, it will be essential to gather mechanistic data on responding CD4+ T cells to assess the effects of various immunomodulatory approaches in early-phase trials. Peptide-MHC class II (pMHCII) multim...

New design of MHC class II tetramers to accommodate fundamental principles of antigen presentation.

Direct identification and isolation of Ag-specific T cells became possible with the development of MHC tetramers, based on fluorescent avidins displaying biotinylated peptide-MHC complexes. This approach, extensively used for MHC class I-restricted T cells, has met very limited success with class II peptide-MHC complex tetramers (pMHCT-2) for the detection of CD4(+)-specific T cells. In additio...