October 23, 2017
Micro204 B Cell Activation ‘Flipped’ Lecture
Cyster/Zikherman
Organization of Flipped Session
Before the class, please watch the video of the 2013 B Cell Activation lecture from the link on Micro204 website https://immunology.ucsf.edu/Micro204schedule
You’ll need to be logged in to My Access. The ppt file is also available for download.
While watching, write down at least 2 or 3 questions about anything in the lecture, whether because it was unclear or you simply want to understand more about that point. Come to the lecture ready to ask at least one question!
As a group we will reconstruct (diagram on the white board) the fate decisions / cell types / signals needed to generate long-lived plasma cells producing high affinity neutralizing antibodies, when starting from naïve B cells. Practice doing this ahead of time.
Read the paper Hou et al., 2011 (Immunity 34, 375) and write down any questions you have about the paper (often good to do this by marking queries on the printout or PDF) and come ready to discuss. We will particularly focus on the findings in Figure 6.
Integrating our understanding from the lecture and the paper, the third part of the flipped lecture will be to use our knowledge of B cell activation to design a vaccine against an important pathogen (e.g. Ebola, Zika, Malaria, Rotavirus, Pneumococcus).
The session will be organized roughly as follows:
1:00 – 1:25pm Questions about last year’s lecture (and replay of imaging videos from the lecture as needed) and draw diagram of a T-dependent antibody response
1:25 – 1:50pm Discuss the Immunity paper (Figure 6) and associated questions.
1:50 – 2:15pm Combine thinking from lecture and paper into thoughts about design of a vaccine. Break out into groups of 3-4 to consider in-class questions about how to design such a vaccine (each group chooses one pathogen to target).
2:15 – 2:30 Get back together as a group to go over each groups ideas on vaccine design.
Questions to consider while reading Hou et al., 2011 Immunity 34, 375:
1. How does Myd88 in the DC augment the B cell response to OVA mixed with soluble CpG?
2. What does a viral like particle (VLP) look like?
3. Most assays in the paper measure serum antibody by ELISA but some (such as in Figure 5C) measure antibody secreting cell (plasma cell) numbers. Briefly explain how these assays are performed and how they differ in what they are measuring.
4. Draw a diagram, keeping it as simple as you can, containing a B cell, a DC and a T cell and showing where Myd88 is acting during the antibody response (1) to VLP mixed with soluble CpG and (2) to VLP containing CpG. The diagram should help explain why Myd88 function in the B cell is important only in context 2.