- Antibody-secreting plasma cells persist for decades in human intestine.
Antibody-secreting plasma cells persist for decades in human intestine.
Plasma cells (PCs) produce antibodies that mediate immunity after infection or vaccination. In contrast to PCs in the bone marrow, PCs in the gut have been considered short lived. In this study, we studied PC dynamics in the human small intestine by cell-turnover analysis in organ transplants and by retrospective cell birth dating measuring carbon-14 in genomic DNA. We identified three distinct PC subsets: a CD19