State Key Laboratory for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Collaborative Innovation Center for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing, China.
Beijing Center for Diseases Prevention and Control, Beijing 100013, China.
Life Sci. 2018 Sep 15;209:388-394. doi: 10.1016/j.lfs.2018.08.040. Epub 2018 Aug 18.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the most successful pathogen with multiple mechanisms to subvert host immune response, resulting in insidious disease. There are few studies on whether the bacteria undergo antigenic variation in response to host immune pressure. Studies on T cell epitopes of M. tuberculosis can help us further understand the mechanism of interaction between the bacteria and host immune system. Here, we selected 180 M. tuberculosis complex in China, amplified 462 experimentally verified human T cell epitopes, sequenced and compared the results to analyze the diversity of those epitopes. It proved that a large majority human T cell epitopes of M. tuberculosis are conserved. However, polymorphisms of T cell epitopes indicated different categories of proteins suffered divergence from host immune pressure. Moreover, Beijing strains are more conservative than non-Beijing strains in T cell epitopes, which might make them easier to transmit than non-Beijing strains.
结核分枝杆菌是最成功的病原体之一，它有多种机制来颠覆宿主的免疫反应，导致隐匿性疾病。关于细菌是否会针对宿主免疫压力发生抗原变异，相关研究较少。对结核分枝杆菌 T 细胞表位的研究可以帮助我们进一步了解细菌与宿主免疫系统相互作用的机制。在这里，我们选择了中国的 180 株结核分枝杆菌复合体，扩增了 462 个经过实验验证的人类 T 细胞表位，进行测序并比较结果，以分析这些表位的多样性。结果证明，结核分枝杆菌的大多数人类 T 细胞表位是保守的。然而，T 细胞表位的多态性表明，不同类别的蛋白质受到来自宿主免疫压力的选择。此外，与非北京株相比，北京株的 T 细胞表位更保守，这可能使它们比非北京株更容易传播。
