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Antigen Presentation to B Cells

Balthasar A Heesters1, Cees E van der Poel2, Abhishek Das2

  • 1Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Boston Children's Hospital and Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA; Current address: Department of Cell Biology and Histology, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, 1105 AZ, The Netherlands.

Trends in Immunology
|October 30, 2016
PubMed

Unlike T cells that recognize digested peptides, B cells recognize their cognate antigen in its native form. The B cell receptor used in recognition can also be secreted to bind to antigens and initiate multiple effector functions such as phagocytosis, complement activation, or neutralization of receptors. While B cells can interact with soluble antigens, it is now clear that the presentation of membrane-bound antigen plays a crucial role in B cell activation, and in particular during affinity-maturation, the process during which high-affinity B cells are selected. In this review we discuss how native antigen is presented to B cells and its impact at several stages of B cell responses.

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