Next Generation Sequencing Facilitates Quantitative Analysis of Wild Type and Bcl6-/- helper T cell Transcriptomes. Mus musculus

Virus infection induces T follicular helper (TFH) and T helper 1 (TH1) cells. Although TFH cells are important in anti-viral humoral immunity, the role of TH 1 cells is still elusive. IgG2 antibodies predominate in the response to vaccination with inactivated Influenza A virus (IAV) and were responsible for protective immunity to lethal challenge with pathogenic H5N1 and pandemic H1N1 IAVs even in mice lacking TFH cells owing to B or T cell-specific ablation of the Bcl6. We demonstrate that IL-21 and IFN-γ secreted from TH1 cells were essential for greater persistence and higher titers of IgG2 protective antibodies. These results suggest that TH1 induction could be a promising strategy to induce effective neutralizing antibodies against emerging influenza viruses. Overall design: TH1 or TFH cells of wild type (WT) and conditional Bcl6-/- mice were sorted and analyzed the transcriptome using Illumina HiSeq1500.