Comparison of rapidly vs. slowly dividing CD8 T cells during acute homeostatic proliferation. Mus musculus

Our earlier study demonstrated that when CFSE-labeled LCMV-or Pichinde virus-immune spleen leukocytes were transferred into T cell-deficient hosts, the bona fide virus-specific memory cells underwent relatively limited cell division and were substantially diluted in frequency by other more extensively proliferating cells originating from that donor cell population. We questioned how the slowly dividing population, which contained bona fide memory cells, differed from the rapidly dividing cells, which contained “memory-like” cells. As a preliminary screen we performed a comparative genome-wide microarray analysis of genes expressed on sorted rapidly proliferating (CFSE-low) and slowly proliferating (CFSE-high) CD8 cell populations Keywords: Division profile comparison Overall design: 2x10^7 CFSE-labeled, Ly5.1+, LCMV-Immune splenocytes were adoptively transferred into congenic T cell ko hosts. Splenocytes were harvested 12 days post-transfer and stained with anti-CD8 Ab, anti-Ly5.1 Ab and 7AAD. 7AAD negative cells were gated, and CFSE-low (> eight divisions) and CFSE-high (0-6 divisions) cells were sorted by flow cytometry using a FACStarPLUS sorter (BD Bioscience, Mountain View, CA). Total RNA was extracted from both CFSE-low and CFSE-high CD8+Ly5.1+ donor populations to compare rapidly vs. slowly dividing CD8 T cells during acute homeostatic proliferation via Affymetrix gene analysis.