| First Author | Patel SJ | Year | 2017 |
| Journal | J Immunol | Volume | 199 |
| Issue | 9 | Pages | 3212-3221 |
| PubMed ID | 28972091 | Mgi Jnum | J:254759 |
| Mgi Id | MGI:6103817 | Doi | 10.4049/jimmunol.1700982 |
| Citation | Patel SJ, et al. (2017) CD8(+) T Cells Prevent Lethality from Neonatal Murine Roseolovirus Infection. J Immunol 199(9):3212-3221 |
| abstractText | A recently described mouse homolog of the human roseoloviruses, murine roseolovirus (MRV), causes loss of peripheral and thymic CD4(+) cells during neonatal infection of BALB/c mice. Despite significant disruptions to the normal adaptive immune response, infected BALB/c mice reproducibly recover from infection, consistent with prior studies on a related virus, mouse thymic virus. In this article, we show that, in contrast to published studies on mouse thymic virus, MRV appears to robustly infect neonatal C57BL/6 (B6) mice, causing severe depletion of thymocytes and peripheral T cells. Moreover, B6 mice recovered from infection. We investigated the mechanism of thymocyte and T cell loss, determining that the major thymocyte subsets were infected with MRV; however, CD4(+) and CD4(+)CD8(-) T cells showed increased apoptosis during infection. We found that CD8(+) T cells populated MRV-infected thymi. These CD8(+) T cells expressed markers of activation, had restricted TCR repertoire, and accumulated intracellular effector proteins, consistent with a cytotoxic lymphocyte phenotype and suggesting their involvement in viral clearance. Indeed, absence of CD8(+) T cells prevented recovery from MRV infection and led to lethality in infected animals, whereas B cell-deficient mice showed CD4(+) T cell loss but recovered from infection without lethality. Thus, these results demonstrate that CD8(+) T cells are required for protective immunity against a naturally occurring murine pathogen that infects the thymus and establish a novel infection model for MRV in B6 mice, providing the foundation for detailed future studies on MRV with the availability of innumerable mutant mice on the B6 background. |
