Isolation and characterization of an HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein-specific B-cell from an immortalized human naïve B-cell library.

With the recent development of single B-cell cloning techniques, an increasing number of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-specific broadly neutralizing antibodies have been isolated since 2009. However, knowledge regarding HIV-1-specific B cells in vivo is limited. In this study, an HIV-1-specific B-cell line was established using healthy PBMC donors by the highly efficient Epstein-Barr virus transformation method to generate immortalized human naïve B-cell libraries. The enrichment of HIV-1 envelope-specific B cells was observed after four rounds of cell panning with the HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein. An HIV-1 envelope-specific stable B-cell line (LCL-P4) was generated. Although this cell line acquired a lymphoblastic phenotype, no expression was observed for activation-induced cytidine deaminase, an enzyme responsible for initiating somatic hypermutation and class switch recombination in B cells. This study describes a method that enables fast isolation of HIV-1-specific B cells, and this approach may extend to isolating other B-cell-specific antigens for further experiments.