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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2015 May 1.
Published in final edited form as: Cell Microbiol. 2014 Mar 28;16(5):784–795. doi: 10.1111/cmi.12282

Figure 5. Preferential parasite infection of higher ploidy cells is not dependent on their increased size.

Figure 5

The size of hepatocytes of different ploidy from infected mice was analyzed using forward scatter during flow cytometry. Cell size increases with increased polyploidy (A). Using Imagestream analysis, cells were gated by ploidy, and the pixel size of infected and uninfected cell images were measured within each ploidy subset. When stratified by ploidy level no difference was found in the average sizes of infected and uninfected cells (B). Expected rates for hepatocyte infection were calculated based on surface area of each ploidy subset as described in equation (2) and compared to observed infection rates. The observed infection rates were lower than expected rates for 2n and 4n cells, and higher in 8n and 16n and greater cells (C). This shows that preferential infection of polyploid cells is not dependent on the relative surface area of each population.