Immunodominance is independent of structural constraints: each region within hen eggwhite lysozyme is potentially available upon processing of native antigen.

Abstract

T cell responses to different protein Ags have been shown to focus on a few ("immunodominant") determinants. We have addressed three major, interrelated questions regarding immunodominance. First, can each area within hen eggwhite lysozyme (HEL) serve as an immunodominant focus in different inbred mouse strains or are there structural constraints that limit the utilization of certain segments of the molecule? Second, in MHC-congenic mice with identical non-MHC genes, is response to HEL restricted to one or more members of a set of HEL determinants owing to processing constraints imposed by the background genes? Third, does a truncated TCR repertoire influence the immunodominance of certain determinants of HEL? Our results in 19 strains of mice, representing 11 different MHC haplotypes, demonstrate that the immunodominant determinants within HEL are distributed all over the molecule, suggesting that there is no inherent structural constraint imposed on certain regions to be always immunorecessive. However, in different mouse strains, the emergence of identical regions of HEL as immunodominant sites strictly correlates with the identity of their MHC haplotypes but not genetic background (non-MHC) genes. We attribute this relationship to "MHC-guided processing" of native Ag. Finally, our results demonstrate that a truncated TCR repertoire can result not only in the loss of response to certain immunodominant determinants, but can also result in a gain. These results should contribute significantly to further understanding of the mechanism of immunodominance.