Resolving T cell — T cell transfer of HIV-1 by optical nanoscopy

摘要

Summary form only given. The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). A thorough understanding of the infection on a cellular level is important for the development of new classes of therapeutics or vaccines to combat this virus. HIV can enter CD4+ T cells either as a cell-free virus or by direct cell-cell transmission. An infected T cell can engage in a virus dependent adhesive structure with an uninfected CD4 + T cell, called the Virological Synapse (VS), where virus assembly occurs preferentially within a spatially narrowly confined region and where newly synthesized virus is endocytosed by the target cell. This process occurs on a small spatial scale, while the cells are highly polarized and motile [1, 2]. Resolving the viral transfer involves optical nanoscopy methods that can follow this process with high resolution and high speed. Our method of choice is super-resolved Structured Illumination Microscopy (SRSIM) which provides double the resolution compared to conventional microscopy and has the ability to simultaneously acquire fast, super-resolved three-dimensional images, with multiple colors. [3]. Therefore, the simultaneous observation of several components of the infection process is possible.