Liver Environment-Imposed Constraints Diversify Movement Strategies of Liver-Localized CD8 T Cells

Pathogen-specific CD8 T cells face the problem of finding rare cells that present their cognate Ag either in the lymph node or in infected tissue. Although quantitative details of T cell movement strategies in some tissues such as lymph nodes or skin have been relatively well characterized, we still lack quantitative understanding of T cell movement in many other important tissues, such as the spleen, lung, liver, and gut. We developed a protocol to generate stable numbers of liver-located CD8 T cells, used intravital microscopy to record movement patterns of CD8 T cells in livers of live mice, and analyzed these and previously published data using well-established statistical and computational methods. We show that, in most of our experiments, Plasmodium-specific liver-localized CD8 T cells perform correlated random walks characterized by transiently superdiffusive displacement with persistence times of 10-15 min that exceed those observed for T cells in lymph nodes. Liver-localized CD8 T cells typically crawl on the luminal side of liver sinusoids (i.e., are in the blood); simulating T cell movement in digital structures derived from the liver sinusoids illustrates that liver structure alone is sufficient to explain the relatively long superdiffusive displacement of T cells. In experiments when CD8 T cells in the liver poorly attach to the sinusoids (e.g., 1 wk after immunization with radiation-attenuated Plasmodium sporozoites), T cells also undergo Lévy flights: large displacements occurring due to cells detaching from the endothelium, floating with the blood flow, and reattaching at another location. Our analysis thus provides quantitative details of movement patterns of liver-localized CD8 T cells and illustrates how structural and physiological details of the tissue may impact T cell movement patterns.