V Beta 17 Summary

Dr. Kappler and his wife performed an experiment to determine why the immune system tolerates self-antigens. They began trying to make some reagents that would allow them to better study the structure of a T cell receptor. While conducting their study on mice, they found that there were some mice that had the gene for a particular component called V beta 17. Dr. Kappler and his wife numbered these beta components accordingly. Some mice had the v beta 17, while others did not have the gene. This gave them the tools they needed to study T cell receptors. They took T cells from mice that had the V beta 17 gene and used them as an antigen to immunize the mouse that didn’t have any V beta 17. This mouse saw V beta 17 genes as a foreign antigen and made antibodies that would bind to the V beta 17 on the T cells. Afterwards, they isolated these antibodies and had a tool that they used to find v beta 17 because these antibodies bonded specifically to V beta 17. They attached a tag which would fluorescence green when a bright blue light was shined on it. Whenever a bright blue light was shined to this chemical it would glow green. Then they used the antibody to attach to a T cell that has V beta 17 as part of its receptor. They had a way of discriminating from the other T cells, because this antibody won’t bind to those without V …show more content…
they want to know how many of the t cells will be using v beta 17. those put those t cells in a test tube in suspension and add some antibody tagged with green dye. The question then is how many T cells have bound the antibody. They used a technique called flow cytometry that takes a minute or two to determine how many T cells glow green. It takes that suspension of cells and it creates a stream of cells where all the cells are lined up flowing through a chamber. These cells travel at a very high rate at around 5,000 cells or more per