Figure 1.

Descriptors of donor humanized mice. (A) Flow cytometric gating strategy for human cell reconstitution in NSG-humanized mice. In brief, human cells (hCD45+) were gated from total lymphocytes and single cells and subsequently grouped into human T lymphocytes (hCD3+) and B lymphocytes (hCD19+). Human CD3+ cells were separated into human CD4+ (hCD4+) and CD8+ (hCD8+) T lymphocytes. Detailed immune and viral information of individual animal (n = 18) was presented as scatter dots covering (B) peripheral human CD45+, CD3+, CD4+, CD8+, and CD19+ cell levels, (C) CD4+/CD8+ T cell ratio, (D) plasma viral load (pVL), (E) tissue HIV-1 DNA, and (F) tissue HIV-1 RNA distributed across spleen, BM, gut, lung, brain, liver, and kidney. Data are expressed as mean ± SEM. Orange dots in (D) indicated that pVL was below the detection limit (DL) of 400 HIV-1 RNA copies/ml as shown by the dotted line. Orange dots in (E,F) shows tissue viral levels of animals with undetected pVL. The DL is below 10 HIV-1 copies/10⁶ human CD45+ cells as measured using semi-nested real time qPCR. The dotted line corresponded to the DL. (G) Spearman's rank correlation tests were conducted between humanized mice pVL and respective spleen DNA (black), spleen RNA (red), BM DNA (blue), and BM RNA (green). The Spearman correlation coefficient (r) and p-value for each analysis were displayed.