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. 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.