1A and B). High expression of Ki67 was observed following polyclonal T cell stimulation

with αCD3/αCD28; Ki67 was observed responses were high on day 1 already, peaked on day 3, and declined thereafter (Fig. 1A and C). Next, we assessed proliferation by Ki67 detection in whole blood from 15 healthy donors, after 6-day culture with no antigen, or with PPD. All donors had undetectable or very low frequencies of Ki67+ CD4+ T cells in unstimulated blood (median, 0.07%). PPD stimulation resulted in higher frequencies of Ki67+ CD4+ T cells in all donors (median, see more 46.1%, Fig. 1D). We also determined whether proliferation could be detected by assessing Ki67 expression in PBMC. Again, Ki67 expression identified in vitro CD4+ T cell proliferation; frequencies of Ki67+ cells after PPD stimulation consistently

exceeded those in unstimulated PBMC, at a median of 21.7% ( Fig. 1E). These data suggest that in 6-day PBMC or whole blood culture with antigen, Ki67 expression is up-regulated in T cells undergoing in vitro proliferation. Next, we compared our Ki67-based proliferation assay with more traditional flow cytometric proliferation assays, i.e., those measuring BrdU incorporation and dye dilution of OG (Fig. 2). BrdU is incorporated into cells undergoing DNA synthesis, and is typically added during the last 2 to 24 h of a proliferation assay; in this study we added BrdU for the last 5 h of the 6-day culture. The frequency of Ki67+ CD4+ T cells was higher than the frequency of BrdU+ cells after whole blood stimulation with PPD or TB10.4 protein (Fig. 2A, B and C). Importantly, all BrdU+ cells co-expressed Selleckchem GSK269962 Ki67 (Fig. 2A). The OG

assay requires uniform labelling of cells prior to long-term culture. In contrast to results from the BrdU assay, the OG and Ki67 assays yielded remarkably similar frequencies of proliferating, specific T cells; Ki67+ and OGlow CD4+ T cell frequencies were not different in PPD or TB10.4-stimulated PBMC (Fig. 2D, E and F). Frequencies PLEK2 of Ki67+ CD4+ T cells correlated strongly with BrdU+ CD4+ T cell frequencies (Fig. 3A and B). Similarly, a strong correlation was found between frequencies of antigen-specific Ki67+ and OGlow CD4+ T cells (Fig. 3C and D). These data show that frequencies of proliferating T cells detected by Ki67 expression agree with frequencies detected with conventional proliferation assays. The functional capacity of cells that have expanded during the 6-day culture may be assessed by short-term polyclonal re-stimulation with PMA and ionomycin on day 6. This induces cytokine production, which can be measured by intracellular staining. We compared expression of IFN-γ, IL-2 and TNF-α by Ki67+ CD4+ T cells with expression of these cytokines in BrdU+ or OGlow CD4+ T cells. When Ki67 and BrdU assay results were compared, similar expression of IFN-γ and TNF-α was observed in proliferating CD4+ T cells.