Spatial confinement promotes germinal center diversity and tempers immunodominance [ZIP-Seq]

Each responding lymph node (LN) can have multiple GCs, and GCs typically do not exchange cells with one another once seeded in the LN. While this isolation of GCs has long been appreciated in lymphoid tissue anatomy, the benefits or drawbacks of this actively maintained organization on the GC response have been unclear.

Here, using mice whose peripheral LNs exhibit GC dispersal due to B cell deficiency in Ga13-dependent G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) activity, we investigate the impacts of GC B cell de-confinement on the evolutionary events following immunization. We find that GC-to-GC trafficking can occur in confinement-defective LNs, and that fluorescent reporter heterogeneity between GCs in multi-color GC lineage tracing mice becomes lost.