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Antigens Involved in Adaptive Immunity

Antigens Involved in Adaptive Immunity

An antigen is any substance the immune system identifies as foreign and potentially harmful to the body, prompting an immune response. Antigens have two functional properties: immunogenicity and reactivity. Immunogenicity is the ability of an antigen to stimulate a specific immune response. At the same time, reactivity describes the antigen's ability to react with the cells and antibodies produced in response to it.
Complete Antigens
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Antigen Processing Pathways

Antigen Processing Pathways

MHC molecules are key players in the immune response, enabling T cells to recognize and respond to specific antigens. They are present on the surface of all nucleated cells in the body and are instrumental in presenting antigens to T cells and activating them. T cells recognize the MHC-antigen complex and initiate an immune response. MHC class I and MHC class II are two main types of MHC molecules, each associated with a distinct antigen processing pathway.
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Defense Against Bacterial Pathogens

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 4, 2026

Use of Single Chain MHC Technology to Investigate Co-agonism in Human CD8+ T Cell Activation

Use of Single Chain MHC Technology to Investigate Co-agonism in Human CD8+ T Cell Activation

Published on: February 28, 2019

Quantifying how MHC polymorphism prevents pathogens from adapting to the antigen presentation pathway.

B V Schmid¹, C Kęsmir², R J de Boer³

¹RIVM, Bilthoven, The Netherlands; Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

|March 1, 2011

Summary

Viruses adapt to host immunity by altering antigen presentation. However, viral escape mutations targeting conserved proteasome and TAP pathways are rare due to MHC polymorphism, limiting viral adaptation.

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Area of Science:

Immunology
Virology
Computational Biology

Background:

The classical antigen presentation pathway involves monomorphic (proteasome, TAP) and polymorphic (MHC Class I) components.
Viruses can evade cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) responses by mutating epitopes, affecting antigen processing or MHC binding.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how MHC polymorphism and the monomorphism of proteasome and TAP influence viral adaptation to the antigen presentation pathway.
To model the adaptation of an HIV-1-like virus within a host population.

Main Methods:

Agent-based modeling of a host population and viral spread.
Simulation of viral adaptation to host-specific antigen presentation pathways.

Main Results:

MHC Class I polymorphism and specificity lead to limited sharing of epitope precursors across hosts.
Escape mutations in epitope precursors are often released from immune selection pressure and can revert.
This results in minimal selection pressure for viruses to adapt to the monomorphic proteasome and TAP.

Conclusions:

Viral adaptation to conserved antigen processing machinery (proteasome, TAP) is limited.
MHC polymorphism shapes viral immune escape, favoring mutations less reliant on conserved processing steps.