Confronting Complexity: Real-World Immunodominance in Antiviral CD8+ T Cell Responses

Antiviral CD8+ T cells respond to only a minute fraction of the potential peptide determinants encoded by viral genomes. Immunogenic determinants can be ordered into highly reproducible hierarchies based on the magnitude of cognate CD8+ T cell responses. Until recently, this phenomenon, termed immunodominance, was largely defined and characterized in model systems utilizing a few strains of inbred mice infected with a handful of viruses with limited coding capacity. Here, I review work that has extended immunodominance studies to viruses of greater complexity and to the real world of human antiviral immunity.