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CUTTING EDGE |
Center for Immunology and Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455
| Abstract |
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| Introduction |
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-chains (8, 9, 10),
and a recent study proposed that this partial
phosphorylation pattern reflects the kinetics of TCR
engagement (11). These data leave open the question of whether TCR
antagonists inhibit a T cell response simply by competing with agonists
for the attention of the TCR, or whether the partial signaling events
induced by antagonists act to induce a global negative signal,
crippling the cells ability to respond to a copresented agonist
ligand. In apparent support of a dominant negative signal model (also described as a "global" negative signal) of TCR antagonism, several reports describe antagonist ligands that appeared to inhibit responses even when presented at a lower density than the agonist ligand (12, 13, 14, 15). This data was interpreted to mean that such inhibition was not due to simple receptor competition, but rather that antagonists generate a negative signal that would block the activation cascade induced by agonists. Indirect support for this idea came from data demonstrating that TCR antagonists could partially inhibit responses to bystander APC presenting agonist ligands (12, 15, 16).
While consistent with a dominant negative model for antagonism, these data do not exclude mechanisms based on receptor competition, especially in light of T cell activation models involving serial triggering (17, 18) and data demonstrating antagonists with higher TCR affinity than weak agonists (19).
One direct prediction of a dominant negative signal model is that
antagonism should occur even if the agonist and antagonist do not
compete for the same TCR (see Fig. 1
and
Results below). To test this directly, we generated T cells
bearing two different MHC class I-restricted TCRs with defined Ag
reactivities. Using these cells, we found no evidence for such
"cross-antagonism," indicating that a global negative signal is not
the mechanism of TCR antagonism.
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| Materials and Methods |
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OT-I (20) and 2C (21) TCR transgenic mice on a C57BL/6 background were crossed and double transgenic animals typed by flow cytometry. Spleen and lymph node cells from single and double TCR transgenic animals were stimulated using B6 spleen cells coated with either OVAp (SIINFEKL) or SIYp (SIYRYYGL) to stimulate through the OT-I and 2C receptors, respectively, or were stimulated using P815 tumor cells, which bear the 2C alloantigen Ld. The CTL lines lines studied were restimulated weekly for up to 5 wk using various combinations of these stimuli.
Peptides
Peptides were synthesized by Research Genetics (Huntsville, AL) and used either without further purification (purity, >80%) or after purification via reverse HPLC (purity, >90%) and were prepared as described previously (16, 20). The OT-I antagonists E1 and V-OVA have been described (16, 20). The SIY-A6 peptide was designed based on the data of Brock et al. (22).
51Cr-release assays for TCR antagonism
EL4 target cells were prepulsed with suboptimal doses of either the OVAp or SIYp agonist peptides during labeling with 51Cr, as described previously (16). After washing the target cells free of unbound agonist peptides, they were incubated briefly with the titrated control or antagonist peptide variants and CTL was added at an E:T ratio of 3:1. Lysis of target cells was determined by 51Cr release and calculated as described previously (23).
Flow cytometry
Expression of the OT-I TCR
-chain (V
2) was detected using
B20 (PharMingen, San Diego, CA), and expression of the 2C receptor was
detected using the clonotypic Ab 1.B2 (a kind gift of Dr. Matthew
Mescher, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN) as
phycoerythrin or biotin conjugates. For negative control staining,
biotinylated T3.70 (24) and CD4-phycoerythrin were used. Biotinylated
Abs were detected using avidin-tricolor (Caltag, Burlingame, CA), and
cells were counterstained with FITC-CD8 (PharMingen).
| Results |
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We derived such T cells by crossing the 2C and OT-I TCR transgenic mice (20, 21). Both TCRs are restricted by the MHC class I molecule Kb, but they recognize distinct Ags: OT-I recognizes OVAp/Kb (16, 20), while 2C recognizes the complex SIYp/Kb (25). There is no cross-reactivity between the receptors for these Ags (Ref. 19 and data not shown).
CD8+ T cells in the blood, spleen, and lymph nodes of these
mice express both TCRs as determined by staining with specific mAbs
(Fig. 2
A and data not shown). Expression of
both the OT-I and 2C receptors was reproducibly lower on the double
transgenic mice than on either parent (Fig. 2
A), yet T cells
from the double transgenic mice could be stimulated with ligands for
either receptor and CTL lines established (data not shown). TCR
expression on representative CTL lines is shown in Fig. 2
, B
and C. In general, these CTL lines had slightly lower
expression levels of OT-I vs 2C receptor (Fig. 2
B), similar
to the freshly isolated cells. Double staining with Abs to each
receptor revealed coordinate expression of both receptors (Fig. 2
C), making them suitable for our purposes.
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We have characterized several TCR antagonists for the OT-I TCR
(16, 20) and chose two well defined variants, E1 and V-OVA. To identify
antagonists for the 2C receptor, variants of the SIY peptide were
tested, based on their ability to bind Kb and their failure
to stimulate a 2C cytolytic response (Ref. 22 and data not shown). The
peptide variants were screened for antagonism of cytolysis by 2C
effector CTL, using our standard approach (16). An antagonist variant
bearing a mutation of Tyr
Ala at position 6 (SIY-A6) was defined in
this way (data not shown and Fig. 3
a).
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Absence of cross-antagonism in 2C x OT-I T cells
2C x OT-I dual reactive CTL lines were established from two
separate mice (#13 and #14) and tested for direct- and
cross-antagonism, as described above. Direct antagonism could easily be
seen for both the 2C and OT-I receptors, using the same antagonist
ligands defined for the parental T cells, but there was no evidence for
cross-antagonism (Fig. 4
, A and
B). For example, when stimulated through the OT-I receptor,
line 13-SPOP was antagonized by E1 and V-OVA as expected, whereas
SIY-A6 failed to inhibit the response. In contrast, when this line was
stimulated through the 2C receptor, the SIY-A6 peptide caused the
expected antagonism while E1 and V-OVA had no effect. CTL line 14S
showed comparable responses (Fig. 4
B), and similar results
were obtained using several different suboptimal agonist doses for
lines from both animals (data not shown). Furthermore, these results
were not significantly affected by differences in the TCR stimuli used
to generate or maintain the CTL lines (data not shown). Thus, our data
indicate that a global negative signal is not a mechanism for TCR
antagonism in our system.
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| Discussion |
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How then can we account for TCR antagonism? As described in Fig. 1
, model 2, there are two likely possibilities. One is that antagonists
induce no signal and act simply by direct competition for the TCR,
preventing its engagement with agonist ligands. This idea has been
criticized by various authors (19, 29) by the argument that the
antagonist would need to engage nearly all the cell surface TCRs to
effectively compete: an unlikely situation given both the low density
of antagonist ligand and high numbers of TCRs, plus the low TCR
affinity for antagonists. However, such reasoning may not be valid for
T cells interacting with physiological ligands, where both the TCR and
its ligands are cell-surface bound. Rather than competing for all TCRs,
antagonists need only compete for TCRs in the vicinity of an agonist
ligand on the APC cell surface, i.e., in the initial T cell-APC contact
cap. From this viewpoint, a simple excess of antagonist vs agonist
ligands would be sufficient to block activation. An additional factor
is the capacity of ligands to interact with multiple TCRs, in the
process termed serial triggering (17, 18). A key feature of this
process is that the TCR should release the ligand fairly rapidly after
activation: thus, a low-affinity TCR ligand (i.e., a typical
antagonist) would serially trigger more TCRs than a higher-affinity
ligand, per unit time. Hence, ironically, an antagonist may efficiently
out-compete an agonist in the T cell-APC contact zone as a direct
consequence of the former ligands lower affinity.
A second, more interesting possibility is that TCR antagonists induce
an abortive signal, i.e., one that acts locally to "inactivate" a
specific TCR, rather than globally to inactivate the T cell. For
example, partial phosphorylation of TCR
-chain
immunoreceptor tyrosine-based activation motifs, observed with
many TCR antagonists and partial agonists (8, 9, 10, 11), might incapacitate
the TCR, preventing its ability to signal following any subsequent
interaction with an agonist. This effect would be TCR specific, i.e.,
it would not affect the signaling capacity of other TCRs expressed on
the same T cell, as is observed in our system. Again, if serial
triggering occurs, this may allow low-affinity antagonist ligands to
interact with and "inactivate" multiple TCRs rapidly.
Reports that certain TCR antagonists inhibit when at molar inferiority vs the agonist (12, 13, 14, 15) are hard to reconcile with the absence of a global negative signal proposed here. Of course, our data do rule out the existence of other "types" of TCR antagonist that might use a dominant negative signal, but we think a more likely explanation concerns subtle differences in the categorization of suboptimal TCR ligands. Specifically, there is a risk that TCR "antagonists" defined by their capacity to inhibit individual T cell response, might actually be partial agonists. Such ligands may induce a specific response that distracts the T cells from their normal function, but are not strict antagonists. Interestingly, all the "dominant" antagonists so far reported were isolated from pathogens (12, 13, 14, 15), and this might suggest they are selected for a role in immune evasion.
In contrast to our data, Evavolds group observed cross-antagonism using a similar system, involving dual TCR cells with MHC class II-restricted receptors (B. Evavold, unpublished observations). This discordance might again result from distinctions between strict antagonist and partial agonist ligands or could be a real difference in the mechanism of CD4 vs CD8 T cell antagonism. Additional experiments with other systems will be needed to resolve this interesting question.
| Acknowledgments |
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| Footnotes |
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2 Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Stephen C. Jameson, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, Box 334 FUMC, University of Minnesota Medical School, 420 Delaware St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455. E-mail address: ![]()
Received for publication December 7, 1998. Accepted for publication January 25, 1999.
| References |
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and lack of zap70 recruitment in APL-induced T cell anergy. Cell 79:913.[Medline]
phosphorylation without ZAP-70 activation induced by TCR antagonists or partial agonists. Science 267:515.
phosphorylation. Science 281:572.
ß T-cell receptor determine the CD4/CD8 phenotype of T cells. Nature 335:229.[Medline]
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