Little is known concerning immunodominance within the CD4 T-cell response to viral infections and its persistence into longterm memory. We tested CD4 T-cell reactivity against each viral protein in persons immunized with vaccinia virus (VV),
Immunodominance refers to the proportion of T cells specific for a defined epitope in relation to the entire set of T cells reacting to a complex antigen (1). For infectious pathogens encoding many polypeptides, the immunodominance of an open reading frame (ORF) is the proportion of the total pathogen-specific response accounted for by T cells reacting with this ORF. Immunoprevalence is a related concept, referring to the proportion of a population responding to an immunogen (2). The CD8 T-cell response to complex microbes can show remarkably strong immunodominance in humans and inbred animals.As antigen processing differs between T-cell subsets, it is not clear that immunodominance also applies to CD4 T-cell responses. For VV, memory CD4 T-cell responses in inbred mice are quite polyclonal and do not exhibit dominance. The top 14 epitopes account for only 20% of the total VV-specific CD4 T-cell response (3). Data for the human CD4 T-cell response to cytomegalovirus, in contrast, were somewhat consistent with immunodominance. Subjects recognized a median of 12 ORFs per person (of 213 ORFs studied), with the top 6 ORFs accounting for about 40% of the overall response (4). In humans, HLA variation is expected to influence the identity of immunodominant and immunoprevalent antigens in specific individuals. Model systems have identified additional factors controlling epitope choice for CD4 T cells, including naïve T-cell repertoire (5), antigen abundance (6), antigen folding (7), protease processing and epitopeflanking regions (8), and antigenic competition (9).Vaccinia virus is an orthopoxvirus that causes an infection that resolves completely in several weeks in immunocompetent hosts. CD4 T-cell memory persists for decades despite the absence of antigen reexposure, but little is known about the detailed architecture of long-term memory. The monotonic decline of specific antibody levels supports lack of intermittent boosting (10). VV has over 200 ORFs, so each human has a myriad of potential CD4 reactive T-cell specificities. Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) also has a complex proteome, but in contrast to self-limited VV infections, HSV-1 infections are chronic with intermittent reactivations. Following initial epithelial replication, the virus establishes persistence in the innervating sensory ganglia. Intermittent reactivation of latent HSV-1 in essentially all HSV-1-infected persons (11) results in periodic viral antigen exposure to HSV-1-specific memory T cells (12).To determine the breadth and persistence of CD4 T-cell immunodominance in acute and chronic human viral infections, we compared patterns of CD4 T-cell immunodominance between recent and remote VV recipients. The immune responses of persons chronically infected with HSV-1 were also investigated as an example of a c...