Fig. 1

Five percent of HTLV-1 proviral load is carried in CD8⁺ cells. HTLV-1-infected CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ cells were separated by magnetic bead sorting and analysed for their HTLV-1 proviral load and integration site frequency. a The number of proviral copies per 100 CD8⁺ cells and the percentage of contribution of CD8⁺ cells to the proviral load was quantified in 12 HTLV-1 carriers. The median percentage of the load carried by CD8⁺ cells was 5 %. A significant positive correlation was found between the proportion of the total HTLV-1 proviral load in PBMCs that was carried by CD8⁺ cells and the proviral load in these cells (p = 0.01, Spearman’s rank correlation). Regression line based on linear regression excluding the CD4⁺ lymphopenic outlier (TBW); see text for details. b The proviral load (PVL, copies per 100 cells) in unsorted PBMCs was strongly correlated with the proviral load in both CD8⁺ cells and CD4⁺ cells (p < 0.0001 and p = 0.004, respectively, Spearman’s rank correlation)