{"doi":"10.1101/2021.05.10.443536","title":"Precursor abundance influences divergent antigen specific CD8 <sup>+</sup> T cell responses after <i>Yersinia pseudotuberculosis</i> foodborne infection","abstract":"Abstract Primary infection of C57BL/6 mice with the bacterial pathogen Yersinia pseudotuberculosis elicits an unusually large H-2K b -restricted CD8 + T cell response to the endogenous and protective bacterial epitope YopE 69-77 . To better understand the basis for this large response, the model OVA 257-264 epitope was inserted into YopE in Y. pseudotuberculosis and antigen specific CD8 + T cells in mice were characterized after foodborne infection with the resulting strain. The epitope YopE 69-77 elicited significantly larger CD8 + T cell populations in the small intestine, mesenteric lymph nodes (MLNs), spleen and liver between 7- and 30-days post infection, despite residing in the same protein and having a similar affinity for H-2K b as OVA 257-264 . YopE-specific CD8 + T cell precursors were ~4.6 times as abundant as OVA-specific precursors in the MLNs, spleen and other lymph nodes of naïve mice, explaining the dominance of YopE 69-77 over OVA 257-264 at early infection times. However, other factors contributed to this dominance as the ratio of YopE-specific to OVA-specific CD8 + T cells increased between 7- and 30-days post infection. We also compared the YopE-specific and OVA-specific CD8 + T cells generated during infection for effector and memory phenotypes. Significantly higher percentages of YopE-specific cells were characterized as short short-lived effectors while higher percentages of OVA-specific cells were memory precursor effectors at day 30 post infection in spleen and liver. Our results suggest that a large precursor number contributes to the dominance and effector and memory functions of CD8 + T cells generated to the protective YopE 69-77 epitope during Y. pseudotuberculosis infection of C57BL/6 mice.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2021,"id":224250,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9566,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":367067,"name":"Zhijuan Qiu","orcid":"0000-0003-3097-7181","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":367074,"name":"Brian S. Sheridan","orcid":"0000-0002-3299-5888","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":258368,"name":"James B. Bliska","orcid":"0000-0002-6047-8837","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":799707,"name":"Yue Zhang","orcid":"0000-0002-0531-5568","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":46,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:54:18.470602Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}