BIOL 363: Topic Study Guide - Memory in the adaptive immune system
This guide encompasses material covered between the first in-class exam and the third take-
home exam, as well as suggestions for study activities that you may find useful. It is
intended to help you focus on the most important topics, but is not comprehensive. Some
material may be on the test that isn’t directly referred to here. Likewise, not everything in this
study guide will be on the test.
I suggest using this study guide to diagnose the areas that you understand well and the
areas where you need more help, rather than exhaustively going through and answering
every question. If you can quickly and completely answer a set of questions, you probably
don’t need to study that area much. If you cannot, it is something you will probably want to go
over more and ask questions about. For these reasons, it is a good idea to take a first pass
through this study guide without your textbook, notes or slides. Working with another student
is also a good idea. Please let me know if you have questions about anything we have
covered in class so far.
Important terms*
*- Suggestions for using these terms:
1) Try going through the list and writing out as full a description as you can for each term
without using the slides, the textbook or your notes.
2) Check the slides and your notes, supplemented by the textbook, to see if you missed
anything.
3) Make flashcards for all those terms you are unfamiliar with.
4) Connect some or all of the terms from each week with a ‘concept map’. If you had to
use some, but not all of the terms from one week, which ones are the most closely
related to each other?
5) Study with another person; explain things to each other.
6) Write down questions about things you are not sure about. Ask them in class or via
email.
Topic – Memory: Primary response, secondary response, humoral response, cell-mediated
response, affinity maturation, class switching, naïve lymphocyte, memory lymphocyte,
effector memory, central memory, activation, expansion phase, contraction phase
Concepts and Questions
Topic – Memory:
▪ What changes occur upon the second exposure to an antigen? How can the
lymphocytes that are clonally expanded from a primary response behave differently
during the second exposure to the same antigen?
o B cells?
o T cells?
o Do any of the cells of the innate immune response become differently activatable?
▪ What is affinity maturation, and how does it happen? What types of cells does it act
upon?
▪ Where are naïve B and T cells most likely to be found in a mammal? Why is that
distribution useful? Where are memory B and T cells each most likely to be found in a
mammal? Why is that distribution useful?
▪ Describe the process of clonal selection during an immune response. How does the
‘repertoire’ of B or T cell specificity differ after the response is completed?
▪ What would you have to do differently to develop a vaccine that mainly activated B cells,
versus a vaccine that mainly activated T cells?
▪ How can functionally different populations of cells be identified using antibodies and flow
cytometry?