Chronic hepatitis C virus infection irreversibly impacts human natural killer cell repertoire diversity.

ABSTRACT: Diversity is a central requirement for the immune system's capacity to adequately clear a variety of different infections. As such, natural killer (NK) cells represent a highly diverse population of innate lymphocytes important in the early response against viruses. Yet, the extent to which a chronic pathogen affects NK cell diversity is largely unknown. Here we study NK cell functional diversification in chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. High-dimensional flow cytometer assays combined with stochastic neighbor embedding analysis reveal that chronic HCV infection induces functional imprinting on human NK cells that is largely irreversible and persists long after successful interventional clearance of the virus. Furthermore, HCV infection increases inter-individual, but decreases in

SUBMITTER: Strunz B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5995831 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature