Avidity Selection of Natural Killer Response to MCMV. Avidity Selection of Natural Killer Response to MCMV

Natural killer (NK) cells are innate lymphocytes that possess features of adaptive immunity, such as the ability to recognize specific antigen, among others. In MCMV infection, the engagement of a subset of NK cells expressing an activating receptor Ly49H with MCMV-derived glycoprotein m157 results in a clonal-like expansion and the generation of a small pool of long-lived memory cells with higher Ly49H expression than the naive Ly49H-expressing NK cell pool. In this study, we interrogate the transcriptional differences between NK cells that express high verus low levels of Ly49H early after infection. Overall design: RNASeq was performed on Ly49Hhi and Ly49Hlow NK cells harvested after 1.5 days post in vivo infection; 4 replicates per group and 50,000 cells per replicate.

自然杀伤（NK）细胞是一类固有淋巴细胞，同时兼具适应性免疫的特征，例如能够识别特异性抗原等。在小鼠巨细胞病毒（MCMV）感染模型中，表达活化受体Ly49H的NK细胞亚群与MCMV来源的糖蛋白m157结合后，会发生克隆样扩增，并产生一小群长寿记忆细胞，这群记忆细胞的Ly49H表达水平高于初始态Ly49H阳性NK细胞群。本研究旨在探究感染早期Ly49H高表达与低表达NK细胞之间的转录差异。总体实验设计：对体内感染1.5天后采集的Ly49H高表达（Ly49Hhi）与Ly49H低表达（Ly49Hlow）NK细胞进行RNA测序（RNA-seq）；每组设置4个生物学重复，每个重复包含50000个细胞。