Abstract
One of the major goals of vaccination is to prepare the body to rapidly secrete specific Abs during an infection. Assessment of the vaccine quality is often difficult to perform, as simple measurements like Ab titer only partly correlate with protection. Similarly, these simple measurements are not always sensitive to changes in the preceding immunization scheme. Therefore, we introduce in this paper a new, to our knowledge, method to assay the quality of immunization schemes for mice: shortly after a recall with pure Ag, we analyze the frequencies of IgG-secreting cells (IgG-SCs) in the spleen, as well as for each cells, the Ag affinity of the secreted Abs. We observed that after recall, appearance of the IgG-SCs within the spleen of immunized mice was fast (<24 h) and this early response was free of naive IgG-SCs. We further confirmed that our phenotypic analysis of IgG-SCs after recall strongly correlated with the different employed immunization schemes. Additionally, a phenotypic comparison of IgG-SCs presented in the spleen during immunization or after recall revealed similarities but also significant differences. The developed approach introduced a novel (to our knowledge), quantitative, and functional highly resolved alternative to study the quality of immunizations.