In the immune system, effector cells are the relatively short-lived activated cells that defend the body in an immune response.

What is the role of effector T cells?

Their main role is to stop T cell-mediated immune response at the end of an immune reaction. A second major task is to suppress auto-reactive T cells that escaped the process of negative selection in the thymus.

What is the difference between memory T cells and effector T cells?

The effector cells are short-lived cells, while the subset of memory cells is formed with a potential of long-term survival-called memory cells (Figure 3).