Premium accounts now available! Sign up and create a premium account. Read more Close

Advertisement

Image

Clonal dynamics of germinal center refueling by secondary immunization

Preprint Created on 29 May 2026 bioRxiv

Many vaccine regimens involve delivery of multiple doses to the same anatomical site, such that booster doses frequently encounter germinal centers (GCs) still active from prior immunization. The consequences of this "GC refueling" to B cell clonality have not been systematically investigated. Using mouse models of mRNA-LNP vaccination combined with multicolor fate-mapping, longitudinal GC imaging, and immunoglobulin sequencing, we show that refueling triggers clonal burst-type expansion of GC-resident B cells, rather than recruiting local memory, resulting in marked focusing of GCs on the descendants of individual B cells. Refueling with a drifted antigen led to limited but detectable retraining of primary-cohort clones, although most variant-specific responses in this setting arose from newly recruited naive B cells. These findings identify GC refueling as a distinct mode of vaccine response with implications for sequential immunization strategies against rapidly evolving pathogens.

Mesin, L., Hobbs, A., Shen, J.-J., Pae, J., Schiepers, A., Abrahamse, N., Muramatsu, H., Tam, Y. K., Pardi, N., Victora, G. D.

Advertisement

Stats

  • Recommendations n/a n/a positive of 0 vote(s)
  • Views 9
  • Comments 0

Recommended by

  • No recommendations yet.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Advertisement