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Research Perspective|Volume 3, Issue 4|pp 438—443

Reversing B cell aging

Ramit Mehr1, Doron Melamed2
  • 1The Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel
  • 2Department of Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
Received: March 17, 2011Accepted: March 27, 2011Published: March 28, 2011
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.100313

Copyright: © 2011 Mehr et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Age-related alterations in the cellular composition of the B lineage are a major cause of the poor antibody response to vaccination and to infectious agents among the elderly population. The mechanisms leading to these changes are poorly understood. Recently, we have shown that these changes reflect, at least in part, homeostatic pressures imposed by long-lived B cells that accumulate with aging, and that aging in the B lineage can be reversed upon alteration of B cell homeostasis by depletion. Here we discuss homeostatic causes for B lineage immunosenescence, and the potential for its rejuvenation.