Telomere length dynamics in human memory T cells specific for viruses causing acute or latent infections
UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and ImmunologyDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2013-08-26Keywords
AgeingTelomere
T cell memory
CD45RA
FlowFISH
Influenza A virus
Cytomegalovirus
Vaccinia virus
Varicella zoster virus
BrdU labeling
Immunology of Infectious Disease
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BACKGROUND: Declining telomere length (TL) is associated with T cell senescence. While TL in naive and memory T cells declines with increasing age, there is limited data on TL dynamics in virus-specific memory CD4+ T cells in healthy adults. We combined BrdU-labeling of virus-stimulated T cells followed with flow cytometry-fluorescent in situ hybridization for TL determination. We analyzed TL in T cells specific for several virus infections: non-recurring acute (vaccinia virus, VACV), recurring-acute (influenza A virus, IAV), and reactivating viruses (varicella-zoster virus, VZV, and cytomegalovirus, CMV) in 10 healthy subjects. Additionally, five subjects provided multiple blood samples separated by up to 10 years. RESULTS: VACV- and CMV-specific T cells had longer average TL than IAV-specific CD4+ T cells. Although most virus-specific cells were CD45RA-, we observed a minor population of BrdU+ CD45RA+ T cells characterized by long telomeres. Longitudinal analysis demonstrated a slow decline in average TL in virus-specific T cells. However, in one subject, VZV reactivation led to an increase in average TL in VZV-specific memory T cells, suggesting a conversion of longer TL cells from the naive T cell repertoire. CONCLUSIONS: TLs in memory CD4+ T cells in otherwise healthy adults are heterogeneous and follow distinct virus-specific kinetics. These findings suggests that the distribution of TL and the creation and maintenance of long TL memory T cells could be important for the persistence of long-lived T cell memory.Source
O'Bryan JM, Woda M, Co M, Mathew A, Rothman AL. Telomere length dynamics in human memory T cells specific for viruses causing acute or latent infections. Immun Ageing. 2013 Aug 26;10(1):37. doi: 10.1186/1742-4933-10-37. Link to article on publisher's siteDOI
10.1186/1742-4933-10-37Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/30090PubMed ID
23971624Related Resources
Link to Article in PubMedRights
Copyright 2013 O'Bryan et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1186/1742-4933-10-37