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Abstract

Immunology and Infection

Use of Single Chain MHC Technology to Investigate Co-agonism in Human CD8+ T Cell Activation

Published: February 28th, 2019

DOI:

10.3791/59126

1Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, 2Immunology Programme, Life Sciences Institute, National University of Singapore, 3Emerging Infectious Diseases Program, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, 4Singapore Immunology Network, A*STAR, 5NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS), National University of Singapore, 6Department of Immunology, Wright-Fleming Institute, Imperial College London

Abstract

Non-stimulatory self peptide MHC (pMHC) complexes do not induce T cell activation and effector functions, but can enhance T cell responses to agonist pMHC, through a process termed co-agonism. This protocol describes an experimental system to investigate co-agonism during human CD8+ T cell activation by expressing human MHC class I molecules presenting pre-determined peptides as single polypeptides (single chain MHC) in a xenogeneic cell line. We expressed single chain MHCs under conditions where low levels of agonist single chain p-MHC complexes and high levels of non-stimulatory single chain p-MHC complexes were expressed. Use of this experimental system allowed us to compare CD8+ T cell responses to agonist pMHC in the presence or absence of non-stimulatory pMHC. The protocol describes cell line transfection with single chain MHC constructs, generation of stable cell lines, culture of hepatitis B virus-specific human CD8+ T cells and T cell activation experiments simultaneously quantifying cytokine production and degranulation. The presented methods can be used for research on different aspects of CD8+ T cell activation in human T cell systems with known peptide MHC specificity.

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Keywords Single Chain MHC

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