Abstract

Intern. Rev. Immunol. Vol. 10, 1993, pp. 365-371 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only 01993 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United States of America Processing of Self-Proteins and Its Impact on Shaping the T Cell Repertoire, Autoimmunity and Immune Regulation K. D. MOUDGIL, A. AMETAN1,t I. S. GREWAL, V. KUMAR, and E. E. SERCARZ Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of California at Los Angeles, CA 90024 +Department of Agricultural Chemistry, University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-Ku, Tokyo 113, Japan (Received March 3, 1993) KEYWORDS: self-antigens, T cell repertoire, autoimmunity, immune regulation, antigen processing, dominant and cryptic antigenic determinants INTRODUCTION: ACQUISITION OF THE REPERTOIRE The issue of how a vast T cell repertoire, potentially responsive to a wide variety of foreign antigens, develops while avoiding autoimmune reactivity has been a topic of intensive investigation for many years. Although T cells are generally unresponsive to self-antigens, the precise mechanism of self-tolerance induction is still not clear. It is now widely accepted that the T cell repertoire is acquired in the thymus through complex positive and negative selection processes involving recognition of peptides derived from self-antigens in associa- tion with the self-major histocompatibility complex (MHC)