Figure 5

Small perturbations in the memory T cell pool exhibit dysfunctional immune responses. A, CD8⁺ T cells isolated from mice with 5HNP_324-332K^b+ perturbations (%5HNP_324-332K^b+ relative to NP_324-332K^b+: mouse 17, 60%; mouse 75, 59%; mouse 10, 45%) were isolated and used in adoptive transfer experiments depicted by the diagram to measure homeostatic proliferation (top) and antigen-driven proliferation (bottom). A detailed description of the protocol can be found in the methods section. B, Representative staining of NP_324-332K^b+ and 5HNP_324-332K^b+ populations from spleen of mouse 75 is shown gated on CD45.2⁺ CD8⁺ cells; numbers inside the gate indicate frequency of tetramer positive cells among CD8⁺ T cells, numbers at upper left corner of plots represent frequency of cells relative to frequency of NP_324-332K^b+ cells (% tetramer frequency ÷ % NP_324-332K^b+) x100). C, Data from adoptive transfer experiments from three different donors (mouse 17, 75 and 10) is graphed as the ratio of perturbed (%5HNP_324-332K^b+) to the rest of the memory T cells (%NP_324-332K^b+ − %5HNP_324-332K^b+) from the spleen. Ratios for each population were normalized to the Ratio prior to transfer. Number of recipients ranged from 1 to 2 for each donor mouse.