[limpon]

Hi Reid, as I said before, I wish you all the best but I simply don't understand how your experiment 2 is going to work. Did I understand correctly that you will immunize mice and then isolate CD4 T cells from the spleen. Then infect those cells and see if cells from immunized mice die slower/less/not at all and don't express p24 in high levels. I'm afraid this experiment will not work this way. CD4 T cells by itself can not be immunized against HIV. The immunizing effect comes from memory B cells that produce antibodies. These antibodies bind to HIV infected CD4 T cells and as such label them as evil to be killed by other cells. CD4 T cells alone will not show any effect in regards to susceptibility to HIV no matter how well your immunization works. As rgejman pointed out, it would be way better to infect the mice with HIV and do a CD4 T cell count there every week. This would be so much easier and it might actually show you something relevant.

[rgejman]

I think that they will incubate CD8 and CD4 T cells from the same mouse together. The CD8 (cytotoxic) T cells, if they recognize the antigen, should kill the infected CD4 cells.

A caveat is activation/co-stimulation. The CD8 T cells should already be activated due to the vaccination and no longer need co-stimulation from DCs... but this depends on the vaccine having delivered enough peptide to stimulate a true immune response in a human/humanized immune system. That's the (first) big unknown here.