impairs T cell priming by inducing dendritic cell death.

The lack of effective adaptive immunity against leads to chronic or repeated infection and serious disease sequelae. Dendritic cells (DCs) are professional antigen-presenting cells that are crucial for the activation of T cells during infection. cDC1s and cDC2s are the two main DC subsets responsible for T cell priming, but little is known about how affects their ability to prime T cells. Using a mouse model of infection, we found that uptake reduced the viability of cDC1s and cDC2s both and , with cDC1s experiencing more death. DC death was mainly due to apoptosis and is alleviated in or knockout DCs. In addition, we observed that -specific CD8+ T cells were preferentially activated by cDC1s. Reduction in DC viability by impaired the ability of infected DCs to activate T cells upon co-culture, although in the case of CD8+ T cell priming, controlling for viability was insufficient to fully rescue the defect. RNA sequencing of DCs from infected mice showed upregulation of cell death pathways, supporting our observations of DC death caused by . Finally, we validated our findings with human DCs , observing -induced cell death. These results indicate that may evade the adaptive immune system by directly inducing cell death in DCs.