Department of Pediatrics, Division of Infectious Diseases, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Institute for Infection, Inflammation, and Immunity in Children (i4Kids), Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Methods Mol Biol. 2025;2857:33-43. doi: 10.1007/978-1-0716-4128-6_4.
Immunosenescence is a well-characterized phenomenon that occurs with increasing age in all immune and somatic cells. In order to best study immunosenescence, it is imperative to develop methods to accurately identify immunosenescent cells. Elderly patients are known to have impaired immune responses to respiratory viruses, and it is hypothesized that this is due, in part, to immunosenescent, terminally exhausted CD8 T cells. To test this hypothesis, we developed an aged mouse model and a flow cytometry protocol using the Cytek Aurora to assess the CD8 T-cell response during respiratory viral infection and identify immunosenescent CD8 T cells. This protocol and our aged mouse model have great potential to be incredibly valuable for future studies elucidating how to rejuvenate and possibly reverse immunosenescent CD8 T cells, which could improve the immune response to respiratory viruses in this at-risk population.
免疫衰老（Immunosenescence）是一种随着年龄增长而在所有免疫和体细胞中发生的特征明显的现象。为了能够最好地研究免疫衰老，开发准确识别免疫衰老细胞的方法是当务之急。众所周知，老年患者对呼吸道病毒的免疫反应受损，据推测，这部分是由于免疫衰老、终末衰竭的 CD8 T 细胞所致。为了验证这一假说，我们开发了一种老年小鼠模型和一种使用 Cytek Aurora 的流式细胞术方案，以评估呼吸道病毒感染过程中的 CD8 T 细胞反应，并鉴定免疫衰老的 CD8 T 细胞。该方案和我们的老年小鼠模型具有很大的潜力，对于未来阐明如何使免疫衰老的 CD8 T 细胞恢复活力并可能逆转的研究将具有非常重要的价值，这可能会改善该高危人群对呼吸道病毒的免疫反应。
