Development of activation-induced marker assay to identify HCV-specific T cells for single-cell RNA-seq analysis.

Identification and isolation of antigen-specific T cells is important for many immunological research areas, including cancer, infectious diseases, and vaccines. We optimized an activation-induced markers (AIM) assay that facilitated detection and scRNA analysis of HCV-specific T cells. Using AIM assay HCV-specific CD4 and CD8 T-cells were sorted from total PBMC's and processed for scRNA-seq.