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Blood, 1 May 2008, Vol. 111, No. 9, pp. 4653-4659. Prepublished online as a Blood First Edition Paper on March 3, 2008; DOI 10.1182/blood-2007-11-123844.
Submitted November 14, 2007
"Developpement du System Immunitaire", Faculte de Medecine, Universite Paris Descartes, Site Necker-Enfants Malades, INSERM U783, Paris, France * Corresponding author; email: weill{at}necker.fr.
The fact that you can vaccinate a child at 5 years of age and find lymphoid B cells and antibodies specific for this vaccination 70 years later remains an immunological enigma. It has never been determined how these long-lived memory B cells are maintained and whether they are protected by storage in a special niche. We report that, whereas blood and spleen compartments present similar frequencies of IgG+ cells, anti-smallpox memory B cells are specifically enriched in the spleen where they account for 0.24% of all IgG+ cells, i.e. 10-20 million cells, more than 30 years after vaccination. They represent in contrast only 0.07% of circulating IgG+ B cells in blood, i.e. 50-100,000 cells. An analysis of patients either splenectomized or rituximab-treated confirmed that the spleen is a major reservoir for long-lived memory B cells. No significant correlation was observed between the abundance of these cells in blood and serum titers of anti-vaccinia virus antibodies in this study, including in the contrasted cases of B-cell depleting treatments. Altogether, these data provide evidence that in humans, the two arms of B cell memory -long-lived memory B cells and plasma cells- have specific anatomical distributions -spleen and bone marrow- and homeostatic regulation.
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