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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences logoLink to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
. 2000 Aug 29;355(1400):1013–1019. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2000.0638

Is human T-cell lymphotropic virus type I really silent?

B Asquith 1, E Hanon 1, G P Taylor 1, C R Bangham 1
PMCID: PMC1692812  PMID: 11186302

Abstract

The role of the cellular immune response to human T-cell lymphotropic virus type I (HTLV-I) is not fully understood. The low level of HTLV-I protein expression in peripheral blood lymphocytes has led to the widely held belief that HTLV-I is transcriptionally silent in vivo. However, most HTLV-I-infected individuals mount a strong and persistently activated cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) response to the virus; this observation implies that there is abundant chronic transcription of HTLV-I genes. Here we show that HTLV-I Tax protein expression rises quickly in freshly isolated peripheral blood lymphocytes, but that expressing cells are rapidly killed by CTLs. Mathematical analysis of these results indicates that the CTL response is extremely efficient and that the half-life of a Tax-expressing cell is less than a day. We propose that HTLV-I protein expression in circulating lymphocytes is undetectable by current techniques because of the efficiency of the CTL-mediated immune surveillance in vivo.

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Selected References

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