Animals receiving flu shots in the same paw for both a first and second dose had better trained memory B cells that bound tighter to the vaccine antigen than did mice who got the doses in separate limbs.
When the adaptive immune system encounters something foreign for the first time—either by infection or vaccination—it trains its army to recognize and fight the invader. Still, repeated exposures to an antigen are often required to optimize this response. And new data suggests that the optimization process can be fine-tuned: booster shots elicited higher quality memory B cells in mice when they were given in the same limb as the original dose, researchers report today (May 6) in Science Immunology.
According to the study authors’ analyses, the higher-quality memory B cells seen after the same-limb booster are direct descendants of memory B cells trained by the first shot that had stuck around in ...
