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arXiv · 2510.02812

Dynamics of memory B cells and plasmablasts in healthy individuals

Andrea Mazzolini·Aleksandra M. Walczak·Thierry Mora
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Abstract

Our adaptive immune system relies on the persistence over long times of a diverse set of antigen-experienced B cells to encode our memories of past infections and to protect us against future ones. While longitudinal repertoire sequencing promises to track the long-term dynamics of many B cell clones simultaneously, sampling and experimental noise make it hard to draw reliable quantitative conclusions. Leveraging statistical inference, we infer the dynamics of memory B cell clonal dynamics and conversion to plasmablasts, which includes clone creation, degradation, abundance fluctuations, and differentiation. We find that memory B cell clones degrade slowly, with a half-life of 10 years. Based on the inferred parameters, we predict that it takes about 50 years to renew 50\% of the repertoire, with most observed clones surviving for a lifetime. We infer that, on average, 1 out of 100 memory B cells differentiates into a plasmablast each year, more than expected from purely antigen-stimulated differentiation, and that plasmablast clones degrade with a half-life of about one year in the absence of memory imports. Our method is general and could be applied to other longitudinal repertoire sequencing B cell subsets.

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Andrea Mazzolini, Aleksandra M. Walczak, Thierry Mora. 2025-10-03. Dynamics of memory B cells and plasmablasts in healthy individuals. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02812

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