Publication Prize 2021 for Veit Buchholz

For the second time, the Else Kröner-Fresenius-Stiftung has awarded three publication prizes for younger scientists, one of which was CRC project leader Veit Buchholz. The prize honors outstanding publications which have arisen from funding on the part of the foundation and is endowed with EUR 10,000.

https://www.ekfs.de/en/scientific-funding/alumni/publication-prize/publication-prize-2021

Early emergence of T central memory precursors programs clonal dominance during chronic viral infection

Simon Grassmann, Lorenz Mihatsch, Jonas Mir, Atefeh Kazeroonian, Roza Rahimi, Sophie Flommersfeld, Kilian Schober, Inge Hensel, Justin Leube, Ludwig O. Pachmayr, Lorenz Kretschmer, Qin Zhang, Adrien Jolly, M. Zeeshan Chaudhry, Matthias Schiemann, Luka Cicin-Sain, Thomas Höfer, Dirk H. Busch, Michael Flossdorf and Veit R. Buchholz. (Dec 2020) Nature Immunology 21: 1563-1573. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-020-00807-y

Abstract cited directly from the paper:
Chronic cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection leads to long-term maintenance of extraordinarily large CMV-specific T cell popu-lations. The magnitude of this so-called ‘memory inflation’ is thought to mainly depend on antigenic stimulation during the chronic phase of infection. However, by mapping the long-term development of CD8+ T cell families derived from single naive precursors, we find that fate decisions made during the acute phase of murine CMV infection can alter the level of memory inflation by more than 1,000-fold. Counterintuitively, a T cell family’s capacity for memory inflation is not determined by its initial expansion. Instead, those rare T cell families that dominate the chronic phase of infection show an early transcriptomic signature akin to that of established T central memory cells. Accordingly, a T cell family’s long-term dominance is best predicted by its early content of T central memory precursors, which later serve as a stem-cell-like source for memory inflation.