Characterization of natural killer cell phenotype and function during recurrent human HSV-2 infection

Abstract

Human natural killer (NK) cell differentiation, characterized by a loss of NKG2A in parallel with the acquisition of NKG2C, KIRs, and CD57 is stimulated by a number of virus infections, including infection with human cytomegalovirus (CMV), hantavirus, chikungunya virus, and HIV-1. Here, we addressed if HSV-2 infection in a similar way drives NK cell differentiation towards an NKG2A-NKG2C+KIR+CD57+ phenotype. In contrast to infection with CMV, hantavirus, chikungunya virus, and HIV-1, recurrent HSV-2 infection did not yield an accumulation of highly differentiated NK cells in human peripheral blood. This outcome indicates that human HSV-2 infection has no significant imprinting effect on the human NK cell repertoire. © 2011 Björkström et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.