EBV persistence involves strict selection of latently infected B cells

EBV is found preferentially in IgD- B cells in the peripheral blood. This has led to the proposal that the recirculating memory B cell pool is the site of long-lived persistent infection. In this paper we have used CD27, a newly identified specific marker for memory B cells, to test this hypothesis. We show that EBV is tightly restricted in its expression. Less than 1 in 1000 of the infected cells in the peripheral blood are naive (IgD+, CD27-) and <1 in 250 are IgD+ memory cells. Furthermore, EBV was undetectable in the self-renewing peripheral CD5+ or B1 cells, a subset that has not been through a germinal center. No such restriction was observed in tonsillar B cells. Therefore, the virus has access to a range of B cell subsets in the lymph nodes but is tightly restricted to a specific long-lived compartment of B cells, the IgD-, CD27+, and CD5- memory B cells, in the periphery. We suggest that access to this compartment is essential to allow the growth-promoting latent genes to be switched off to create a site of persistent infection that is neither pathogenic nor a target for immunosurveillance.