Use of Vaccinia Virus Expression Vectors to Investigate Antigen Processing and Presentation

Vaccinia virus (VV) has been used extensively to study the generation of antigenic (Ag) peptides by the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I and class II (MHC-I and MHC-II) Ag processing pathways (1 -5 ). The ease with which recombinants can be constructed makes VV ideally suited to assess the impact of alterations in Ag structure, intracellular location, and expression levels on processing and presentation by MHC-I and MHC-II molecules. In addition, the wide tropism of VV allows for Ag expression in a variety of cell lines and in vivo applications.