Immune memory develops during primary infections to protect from future exposures to the same pathogen. Vaccines mimic this response and induce immune memory that protects from severe disease and, in some cases, from symptomatic infection. [...]

T follicular helper (TFH) cells play a crucial role in the development of long-lived, high-quality B cell responses after infection and vaccination. However, little is known about how antigen-specific TFH cells clonally evolve in response to complex pathogens and what guides the targeting of different epitopes. [...]

The induction of protective humoral immune responses against sporozoite surface proteins of the human parasite Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) is a prime goal in the development of a preerythrocytic malaria vaccine. The most promising antibody target is circumsporozoite protein (CSP). [...]

Single-cell antigen-receptor gene amplification and sequencing platforms have been used to characterize T cell receptor (TCR) repertoires but typically fail to generate paired full-length gene products for direct expression cloning and do not enable linking this data to cell phenotype information. To overcome these limitations, we established a high-throughput platform for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of human TCR repertoires that provides insights in the clonal and functional composition of human CD4+ and CD8+ αβ T cells at the molecular and cellular level. [...]

Precise clonal and functional assessments of the T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire diversity require paired TCRα and TCRβ gene sequence information at monoclonal level. However, available single-cell strategies are typically limited in throughput and often do not provide full-length DNA templates for direct gene cloning. [...]

Phylogenetically diverse bacteria respond to various stress conditions by mounting a general stress response (GSR) resulting in the induction of protection or damage repair functions. In α-proteobacteria, the GSR is induced by a regulatory cascade consisting of the extracytoplasmic function (ECF) σ factor σEcfG, its anti-σ factor NepR, and the anti-anti-σ factor PhyR. [...]