Preparation and Use of HIV-1 Infected Primary CD4+ T-Cells as Target Cells in Natural Killer Cell Cytotoxic Assays

Cytotoxicity assays to measure natural killer cell lytic responses to HIV-infected cells is limited by the purity of the target cells. We demonstrate here the isolation of a highly purified population of HIV-1 infected primary T-cell blasts by taking advantage of HIV-1 s ability to down-modulate CD4.