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. 2001 Sep 3;194(5):f23–f26. doi: 10.1084/jem.194.5.f23

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© 2001 The Rockefeller University Press

This article is distributed under the terms of an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike–No Mirror Sites license for the first six months after the publication date (see http://www.rupress.org/terms). After six months it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 4.0 Unported license, as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).

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Killing of DCs may regulate the clonal expansion of antigen-specific CD8⁺ T cells. Naive CD8⁺ T cells (N) interact with antigen-presenting DCs and are induced to proliferate and differentiate into killer (K) and memory (M) progeny. (A) DCs that are susceptible to the lytic activity of CTLs are eliminated, preventing the further activation of memory cells. This may serve as a negative feedback mechanism to limit the immune response. However, the net result may also be that T cell expansion is insufficient to provide an effective response. (B) DCs that are resistant to killing by CD8⁺ T cells will remain available for T cell recognition and induce further activation and clonal expansion of memory T cells. However, without the negative regulation provided by DC elimination, excessive accumulation of activated CD8⁺ T cells may result. DCs may also be susceptible to killing by NK cells (not shown in Fig.). This could have an impact on both primary and secondary immune responses.