Fig. 1.

Serum samples from both healthy blood donors and HCV recovered subjects can promote HCV binding to B cells. Ten million genomic copies of HCV 1a (H77s) in 3 ml medium were incubated with 100 µl serum sample at room temperature for 1 h, followed by mixing with 2 ml PBMCs (2.5×10⁷ cells/ml) in complete RPMI medium. The reaction was carried out at 37°C for 2 h. The cells then were processed for separation into B and non-B fractions by using CD19 magnetic microbead column purification as described in Methods section. A negative control that did not incubate virus with serum was included in this study but not plotted in this figure; this control had an HCV viral load on B cells of 411 copies per µg total RNA. Each value represents the mean of triplicate determinations.