THY-1 Cell Surface Antigen (CD90) Has an Important Role in the Initial Stage of Human Cytomegalovirus Infection
Fig 1
Expression of THY-1 positively correlates with HCMV infectivity for both fibroblast and epithelial/endothelial tropic stains of virus in 54 human cell lines.
Cells were infected with both fibroblast tropic HCMV (Towne-GFP) for 2 days and epithelial/endothelial tropic HCMV (TB40E-GFP) for 3 days. We aimed to achieve an infection rate at approximately 10–20% for positive controls without acid inactivation (m.o.i 0.5 for control MRC-5 cells and 0.1–0.5 for ARPE-19 cells). The percentage of infectivity was derived from the mean of three independent infections minus the background florescence contributed by mock-infected cells and normalized against control cell lines (MRC-5 for Towne-GFP, ARPE-19 for TB40E-GFP). THY-1 and PDGFR-α expression levels were determined by multiple microarray platforms (http://dtp.nci.nih.gov/mtweb) and these are baseline levels of RNA in cells not infected with virus. HCMV infectivity positively correlated with THY-1 expression at a level similar to that of PDGFR-α. Cell lines are indicated in S1 Table.