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Journal of Virology, February 2009, p. 1617-1624, Vol. 83, No. 4
0022-538X/09/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JVI.02138-08
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Peripheral NKT Cells in Simian Immunodeficiency Virus-Infected Macaques{triangledown} ,{dagger}

Caroline S. Fernandez, Angela C. Chan, Konstantinos Kyparissoudis, Robert De Rose, Dale I. Godfrey, and Stephen J. Kent*

Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne, 3010 Melbourne, Australia

Received 9 October 2008/ Accepted 24 November 2008

NKT cells are a specialized population of T lymphocytes that have an increasingly recognized role in immunoregulation, including controlling the response to viral infections. The characteristics of NKT cells in the peripheral blood of macaques during simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) or chimeric simian/human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (SHIV) infection were assessed. NKT cells comprised a mean of 0.19% of peripheral blood lymphocytes across the 64 uninfected macaques studied. Although the range in the percentages of NKT cells was large (0 to 2.2%), levels were stable over time within individual macaques without SIV/SHIV infection. The majority of NKT cells in macaques were CD4+ (on average 67%) with smaller populations being CD8+ (21%) and CD4/CD8 double positive (13%). A precipitous decline in CD4+ NKT cells occurred in all six macaques infected with CXCR4-tropic SHIVmn229 early after infection, with a concomitant rise in CD8+ NKT cells in some animals. The depletion of CD4+ NKT cells was tightly correlated with the depletion of total CD4+ T cells. R5-tropic SIVmac251 infection of macaques resulted in a slower and more variable decline in CD4+ NKT cells, with animals that were able to control SIV virus levels maintaining higher levels of CD4+ NKT cells. An inverse correlation between the depletion of total and CD4+ NKT cells and SIV viral load during chronic infection was observed. Our results demonstrate the infection-driven depletion of peripheral CD4+ NKT cells during both SHIV and SIV infection of macaques. Further studies of the implications of the loss of NKT cell subsets in the pathogenesis of HIV disease are needed.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne, 3010 Melbourne, Australia. Phone: 61383449939. Fax: 61383443846. E-mail: skent{at}unimelb.edu.au

{triangledown} Published ahead of print on 3 December 2008.

{dagger} Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://jvi.asm.org/.

Journal of Virology, February 2009, p. 1617-1624, Vol. 83, No. 4
0022-538X/09/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JVI.02138-08
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.





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