Congrats Danica 😀

Interestingly, another old paper described M cells in mouse nasal turbinates.
By sequencing we showed that germinal centers in nasal tissue were essentially transcriptionally identical, but clonally distinct, to those in cervical lymph nodes and NALT. (5/N)

But we found some old studies describing nasal tissue immunity after influenza infection in absence of NALT and cervical lymph nodes. Indeed, we could confirm ectopic germinal centers in the nasal turbinates by microscopy. Cells express AID, we also found Tfh and FDCs. (4/N)

By flow cytometry, a lot of these cells looked like germinal center B cells and followed the same dynamics as those in secondary lymphoid organs (and were antigen specific).
We were confused because we had carefully removed the NALTs before running them. (3/N)

We mapped the conserved epitope targeted by the nanobody to the later patch of H7 HA. Then we used the corresponding peptide to immunize mice and demonstrated some protection against lethal infection.

Using H7N9 we identified several HA-specific nanobodies. All of them showed good neutralization potency against H7N9. One of them was particularly interesting because it cross-reacted with and cross-protected against H1N1 and H3N2 infections in mice.