Productive and non-productive phase of dengue virus infection in human umbilical cord blood: Egress Viral Particles on Vero cell line

Abstract Although dengue virus (DENV) can establish infection in hematopoietic stem progenitor cells (HSPCs), there is little information on dengue virus persistent infection in CD34+ and CD133+ cell surface glycoprotein of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). CD34 and CD133 also function as cell-cell adhesion factors which are present in umbilical cord blood (UCB). In this study, we attempted to establish a persistent infection model of DENV infection in UCB by infecting for a prolonged period of 30 days. Post-infection of DENV exhibited a productive and non-productive phase of DENV production. Using plaque assay, western blot, and confocal microscopy, we Show that CD133 and CD34 cells are target cells for DENV infection. Moreover, we show that DENV particles can be recovered from the non-productive phase of DENV infected CD34 and CD133 cells after co-incubation with Vero cells. We concluded that CD133 and CD34 retain their capacity to produce the infectious virus due to proliferation and their ability to repopulate, as deduced from BrdU proliferation assay and flow cytometry analysis using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding. In summary, the platform to co-culture infected primitive HSCs from its non-productive phase onto Vero cells will give new insight into understanding the DENV dynamics in cell-to-cell transmission and reactivation of the virus.