Kinetics of HTLV-1 reactivation from latency quantified by single-molecule RNA FISH and stochastic modelling
Fig 5
Identification of HTLV-1 antisense transcripts by smFISH.
(A) Typical image captured by smFISH of HBZ mRNA (yellow spot) in a cell (from a patient with HAM, coded TDZ) without ex vivo incubation. Blue indicates the nucleus stained with DAPI. Scale bar (white) = 5 μm. (B) Frequency distribution of the number of HBZ mRNA molecules carried per HTLV-1+ PBMC. Yellow bars show the frequencies observed by smFISH; the number of HTLV-1+ cells analyzed (N) and the average number of HBZ molecules per HTLV-1+ cell (<m>) are indicated in the inset. Black lines indicate the expected frequencies from a Poisson distribution with the parameter <m>. (C) The kinetic model for the antisense transcription. HBZ mRNA is transcribed at the rate k, and degraded at the rate δ.