Our findings provide insight into the human B cell responses to a pandemic influenza virus strain. The unique genetic composition of the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus meant that our relatively young cohort probably had little or no preexisting specific antibody-mediated immunity to this virus before infection (Brockwell-Staats et al., 2009; Dawood et al., 2009; Garten et al., 2009; Hancock et al., 2009) . Thus, two sources of B cells could have contributed to this response: newly recruited naive B cells and preexisting memory B cells that bound to epitopes conserved between past seasonal strains and the pandemic H1N1 strain. We theorize that predominant activation of the latter, preexisting memory cells can account for the observed high frequency of neutralizing antibodies (11/15 HA-binding antibodies), the majority (9/11) of which are cross-reactive with seasonal H1N1 strains (Fig. 3 C) and other group 1 influenza strains, including H5 HA. Several observations support this conjecture.