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Journal of Clinical Microbiology, June 2005, p. 2866-2875, Vol. 43, No. 6
0095-1137/05/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JCM.43.6.2866-2875.2005
Copyright © 2005, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Use of a BJAB-Derived Cell Line for Isolation of Human Herpesvirus 8

Department of Oncology and Surgical Sciences, Oncology Section, University of Padova, Padua,¹ Unit of Infectious Diseases, General Hospital Careggi, Florence,² Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences, University of Padova, Padua,³ Division of Nephrology II, Azienda Ospedaliera, Padua, Italy,⁴ Department of Virology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany,⁵ Immunology and Diagnostic Molecular Oncology, Azienda Ospedaliera, Padua, Italy⁶

Received 4 October 2004/ Returned for modification 23 December 2004/ Accepted 11 February 2005

Establishment of latently infected cell lines from primary effusion lymphomas (PEL) presently is the most efficient system for the propagation of clinical strains of human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8) in culture. Here we describe a new approach to culture productively replicating HHV-8 from patient samples. A BJAB-derived B-cell line, BBF, was found to retain HHV-8 longer, to support the latent and lytic replication programs, and to produce transmissible virus. Supernatants from n-butyrate-treated peripheral blood mononuclear cells of 24 HHV-8-seropositive renal transplant recipients were used to infect BBF cells, and replicating virus was detected in cultures from 11 patients. Moreover, BBF cells infected with saliva strains showed a highly productive profile regardless of the initial viral load, which confirms that infectious HHV-8 can be present in saliva and also suggests that saliva strains may exhibit a high tropism for B lymphocytes. In conclusion, we established an in vitro system that efficiently detects HHV-8 in samples with low viral loads and that produces infectious progeny. BBF cells can be used to propagate HHV-8 from different biological samples as well as to clarify important issues related to virus-cell interactions in a context distinct from endothelial and PEL-derived cell lines.

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