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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. This Article Full Text (PDF) Supplemental Tables and Figure All Versions of this Article: blood-2007-11-123844v1 111/9/4653    most recent Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Rights and Permissions Citing Articles Citing Articles via CrossRef Google Scholar Articles by Mamani-Matsuda, M. Articles by Weill, J.-C. PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Mamani-Matsuda, M. Articles by Weill, J.-C. Social Bookmarking                   What's this?  Previous Article  |  Next Article  Submitted November 14, 2007 Accepted February 27, 2008 The human spleen is a major reservoir for long-lived vaccinia virus-specific memory B cells Maria Mamani-Matsuda, Antonio Cosma, Sandra Weller, Ahmad Faili, Caroline Staib, Loic Garcon, Olivier Hermine, Odile Beyne-Rauzy, Claire Fieschi, Jacques-Olivier Pers, Nina Arakelyan, Bruno Varet, Alain Sauvanet, Anne Berger, Francois Paye, Jean-Marie Andrieu, Marc Michel, Bertrand Godeau, Pierre Buffet, Claude-Agnes Reynaud, and Jean-Claude Weill* "Developpement du System Immunitaire", Faculte de Medecine, Universite Paris Descartes, Site Necker-Enfants Malades, INSERM U783, Paris, France Clinical cooperation group "Immune monitoring", Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen - German Research Center for Environmental Health, Munich, Germany Institute of Molecular Virology, and Clinical cooperation group "Antigen-specific immnuotherapy", Munich, Germany Service d'Hematologie, CHU Bicetre, Le Kremlin-Bicetre, France Service d'Hematologie adulte, Hopital Necker-Enfants Malades, Paris, France Service de Medecine Interne et Immunopathologie, CHU de Toulouse, Toulouse, France Unite d'Immunopathologie, Hopital Saint-Louis, Paris, France Laboratoire d'Immunologie et Pathologie, CHU de Brest, Brest, France Service de Cancerologie, Hopital Europeen Georges Pompidou, Paris, France Service de Chirurgie Digestive, Hopital Beaujon, Clichy, France Service de Chirurgie Digestive, Hopital Saint Antoine, Paris, France Service de Medecine Interne, CHU Henri Mondor, Creteil, France Centre Medical, Institut Pasteur, 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. CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

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