Figure 1. A monoclonal, high affinity CD8+ T cell population generated following natural HCV infection.
A. Longitudinal measurements of viral load and IFN-γ ELISpot responses to two HCV-derived CD8+ T cell epitopes in CL-MCRL. IU: international units. SFU: spot-forming units. B. Representative flow cytometry gating for Dextramer staining of HCV-specific CD8+ T cells. C. Frequency of cells specific for the GPR-epitope measured by Dextramer staining in CL-MCRL. D. Stacked bar plot showing the diversity of GPR-specific clonotypes with paired CDR3α and CDR3β amino acid sequences at time points from CL-MCRL. E. Schematic of the koff dissociation assay using reversible Streptamers. pMHC: peptide-MHC. F. Flow cytometry gating for the identification of the GPR-specific population for the koff dissociation assay. G. Dot plot of staining intensity of the reversible Streptamer backbone and pMHC components over time. The dotted red line indicates the time of addition of biotin. The green curve shows the non-linear regression. The half-life of the curve was calculated and numbers in brackets represent 95% confidence intervals. Cells were placed on ice during intervening periods.