Schematic of the library of liposomes engineered to display virus-like antigens (Ag) in a specific orientation and at a programmable density.
To understand how B cells signal in response to antigen display on viruses, researchers in the laboratory of Wei Cheng and their collaborators at UCSF engineered a set of virus-sized liposomes to display affinity mutants of the model antigen hen egg lysozyme (HEL), in the absence of nucleic acid cargo. Their studies of B cell responses to these synthetic particles led them to propose a novel signal transduction mechanism employed by B cells for recognition of virus-like antigens.