In human T cell studies with PBMC's what are the typical T cell activation markers that people have successfully used - What works in unstimulated and a 6 hour PMA or SEB stim condition?
Hi Krupa,
It depends also on the time of activation.
CD69 is an early activation marker (peaks on 12-24 hrs and then goes down on day 2 and 3 of activation)
Plot Ki67 and CD45RA. We gate on CD45RA negative and Ki67 positive as activated and CD45 RA negative KI67 negative as memory T cells (My suggestion is to go with this as we use this in our lab immune monitoring panel).
The selection of markers depends on your specific needs. Cell subtype, time of activation, etc.
Best,
Anchana
Hi Anchana,
Thanks for your suggestion. I was contemplating between CD38, Ki67, HLA-DR and CD 69 but have to choose 2 out of the 4.
Krupa
Great suggestions added here. I just wanted to add that you should be quite careful with different expression levels between CD4+ and CD8+ and the subtypes (memory, naive, regulatory, etc) within each of them, that can fully change the spectrum of things you might want to measure.
I was thinking mostly about homing/chemokine markers. Check these:
http://www.nature.com/nri/journal/v16/n2/fig_tab/nri.2015.1_T1.html
https://www.bdbiosciences.com/documents/cd_marker_handbook.pdf
Hi Krupa,
beware that CD69 is indeed upregulated upon activation but can also be a marker of non-activated tissue-resident memory cells: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/25/9229.short
So it's not necessarily correlated with activation. I agree with the markers suggested by Quirin, CD40L for conventional T cells and 4-1BB for Tregs have been successfully used f.e. to identify antigen-specific cells following antigenic restimulation.
Best,
Jakob
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