Growing up on the streets: why B-cell development differs from T-cell development

✍ Scribed by Sarah E Townsend; Bennett C Weintraub; Christopher C Goodnow

• Book ID: 104299070
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 280 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-5699
• DOI: 10.1016/s0167-5699(98)01440-6

✦ Synopsis

hy do B cells Ôgrow up on the streetsÕ? Much of T-cell development occurs in the thymus, geographically sequestered from the sites of active immune responses. This cloistered environment ensures that many self-reactive T cells are eliminated before joining the mature T-cell repertoire. B cells also undergo several forms of negative selection of self-reactive specificities. Recent experiments suggest that, in contrast to T-cell development, much of B-cell negative selection occurs in the same location in which immune responses to foreign antigens are initiated Ð the outer T-cell zone of the spleen (reviewed in Ref. 1). This maturation of B cells in a public environment Ð growing up on the streets Ð has important implications for the mechanisms that maintain selftolerance and that might contribute to the development of autoimmune disease. Here, we suggest that the public shaping of the Bcell repertoire allows the recruitment of multiple specificities, including weakly self-reactive specificities, into the functional immune repertoire, and that this mechanism for increasing repertoire diversity offsets the risk of autoimmunity.