Immune deficiency, immune silencing, and clonal exhaustion of T cell responses during viral infections

Analyses of the complex regulatory networks leading to T cell survival, dea th, and immune deficiency have been aided in the past year by the dramatic development of new technologies to identify T cells and assess T cell funct ion. These new techniques have shown that functional inactivation and apopt otic elimination of both virus-specific and non-virus-specific T cell popul ations mold T cell responses to viral infections.