Fig 4.

Clustering of OT-I cells around GFP⁺ infected hepatocytes during liver-stage infection with PbA-gfpOVA. Activated DsRed/OT-I CD8⁺ T cells were transferred into B6 mice at a dose of 3 × 10⁶ (A, C, D, F) or 1 × 10⁷ (B, C to F), and the mice were infected with PbA-gfpOVA sporozoites (1 × 10⁴). (E, F) Some mice did not receive DsRed/OT-I or were not infected with PbA-gfpOVA as controls. At 48 h after infection, the liver was imaged with TPM. (A, B) The 2-dimensional projections of 3-dimensional imaging volumes are shown. Bars, 10 μm. A still image of GFP⁺ cell disappearance while in contact with OT-I cells is shown (A, right; a time-lapse image is shown in Movie S1 in the supplemental material). (C, E) The numbers of GFP⁺ cells and T cell clusters within a surface area of 75 mm² were counted using fluorescence microscopy. (D, F) GFP⁺ cells and T cell clusters were imaged in 3 dimensions using TPM, and the number of OT-I cells within each cluster was determined using Imaris software. (D) The number of OT-I cells was determined separately for clusters containing and not containing GFP⁺ cells. Bars indicate averages. *, P < 0.05; **, P < 0.01; ***, P < 0.0001.