This permits the analysis of more defined antigen specific responses while reducing the requirement to handle live influenza virus in the laboratory. We have developed a method to potentiate the detection and analysis

of influenza antigen specific T cells utilizing infected selleck chemicals llc CKC to present viral peptides in a manner biologically relevant to CD8 T cells. We have demonstrated that our co-culture ELISpot detects greater numbers of antigen specific CD8 T cells than ELISpot with whole virus as an antigen. Our assay can also be adapted to use recombinant viruses to infect CKC, increasing its specificity and reducing the requirement to work with live influenza virus. Our results are the first to demonstrate detection by flow cytometry of influenza-specific IFNγ responses in individual T cells from LPAI infected birds. The ability of our method to detect such large numbers of antigen specific T cells (similar numbers to positive controls with PMA/ionomycin, see example Supplementary Ku 0059436 Fig. 5) likely reflects not only the high promiscuity of the B21 haplotype, but also the fact that our CKC cell line expresses only MHC

class I and presents peptides following a biologically relevant infection process. In ELISpot using whole influenza virus we were able to detect antigen specific responses, although these were much lower (Fig. 1). Although ELISpot has previously been used to measure antiviral responses against other avian viruses, including NDV (Ariaans et al., 2008) and IBV (Ariaans et al., 2009), it has never been employed to analyze avian

responses to influenza. In the present study, click here following challenge with H7N7 LPAI, the birds became serologically positive and showed specific IFNγ responses, irrespective of whether inactivated or live avian influenza virus was added to endogenous APCs (Fig. 1). Additionally, ELISpot with live virus added to splenocytes from infected birds further reduced SFU counts. It is possible that live virus affects the interactions, and/or the functionality, of cells in vitro (Hinshaw et al., 1994, Oh et al., 2000 and Hao et al., 2008). It was interesting to note that splenocytes from infected birds have greater SFU responses to PMA in our study. PMA does not activate all T cells (Suzawa et al., 1984 and Kim et al., 1986)., It may be that antigen experienced cells (from infected birds) have a lower threshold of activation and are activated more readily by PMA, hence the higher SFU counts in the infected cohort positive control compared with the non-infected. Another possibility is altered lymphocyte subset frequencies in infected birds.