There is growing consensus for an urgent need to develop efficient methods to analyze the human T and B cell response in order to understand its regulation, to unravel host-pathogen interactions and to design better vaccines. In this review we will consider different methods that have been developed to analyze human T and B cells and focus in particular on those based on high-throughput cell culture, such as memory B cell immortalization, plasma cell cultures and libraries of naïve or memory T cells. These culture-based methods can be used to interrogate with high efficiency the immune repertoires in order to characterize the frequency, function and specificity of naïve or memory T cells and to isolate potent and broadly neutralizing monoclonal antibodies.
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