Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology Volume 2010, Article ID 834326, 7 pages doi:10.1155/2010/834326 Research Article Tomatine Adjuvantation of Protective Immunity to a Major Pre-erythrocytic Vaccine Candidate of Malaria is Mediated via CD8+ T Cell Release of IFN-γ Karen G. Heal1, 2 and Andrew W. Taylor-Robinson1 1 Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK 2 Department of Biology, University of York, York YO10 5YW, UK Correspondence should be addressed to Andrew W. Taylor-Robinson,
[email protected] Received 1 August 2009; Revised 26 October 2009; Accepted 8 January 2010 Academic Editor: Abhay R. Satoskar Copyright © 2010 K. G. Heal and A. W. Taylor-Robinson. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The glycoalkaloid tomatine, derived from the wild tomato, can act as a powerful adjuvant to elicit an antigen-specific cell-mediated immune response to the circumsporozoite (CS) protein, a major pre-erythrocytic stage malaria vaccine candidate antigen. Using a defined MHC-class-I-restricted CS epitope in a Plasmodium berghei rodent model, antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte activity and IFN-γ secretion ex vivo were both significantly enhanced compared to responses detected from similarly stimulated splenocytes from naive and tomatine-saline-immunized mice. Further, through lymphocyte depletion it is demonstrated that antigen-specific IFN-γ is produced exclusively by the CD8+ T cell subset.