“Everything came together in that image. Everything clicked,” Alain said. The foreign element (the viral peptide in its groove) and the self element (the spiral MHC edges of the molecule) are both visible to the T cell. Alain was infinitely moved by looking at that structure; he could actually visualize the presentation of a viral peptide to a T cell. “[E]very immunologist’s pulse will race as he or she sees the three-dimensional structure of the binding site of an MHC molecule displayed for the first time,” he wrote in the pages of Nature, because it will explain the “structural basis” of
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