Fig. 2.

Infectiousness of SIV in peripheral blood and AT-SVF CD4 T cells of chronically infected rhesus macaques. a Plasma viral loads of chronically SIVmac251-infected monkeys. b Viral outgrowth of SIV from peripheral blood (PB) and adipose tissue (AT-SVF) CD4 T cells. PBMC was isolated from peripheral blood and AT-SVF cells isolated from adipose tissue of infected monkeys at necropsy. CD4 T cells were then purified from PBMC or AT-SVF cells, and activated with PHA + IL-2 and co-cultured with M8166 cells for 3–4 weeks in viral outgrowth assays as described in “Methods” section. Graphs show extracellular p27 levels from PBMC- or AT-SVF-derived CD4 T cells for five infected monkeys (numbers in parentheses indicate the input cell number at the start of the assay). For two infected monkeys (RM 10–68 and 10–75, bottom two plots), peripheral blood was unavailable, and an exact AT-SVF CD4 T cell count undetermined (but estimated at ~5 × 10³–2 × 10⁴ cells)