Correlation of psoriasis activity with abundance of CD25+CD8+ T cells:: conditions for cloning T cells from psoriatic plaques

The role of T cells in the pathogenesis of psoriasis is widely acknowledged. However, key aspects of their precise function in the disease as well as the relative pathogenic contribution of T-cell subsets are still unknown. T-cell clones have been isolated from psoriatic plaques but a study of conditions affecting the isolation and expansion of T-cell clones from psoriatic skin has not been reported to date. Here, we observe a correlation of disease activity with the frequency of the CD3(+)CD8(+)CD25(+) subset. We show that prolonged in vitro culture changes the phenotypic subset distribution of T-cell lines derived from psoriatic skin and that T-cell clones can be isolated by sorting of CD25(+) cells emigrated from skin fragments after 7 days. We evaluate various conditions affecting expansion of psoriatic T-cell clones in vitro and show that blocking apoptosis can facilitate proliferation of activated T-cell clones in vitro. Our results indicate a prominent role of the CD8(+)CD25(+) T-cell subset in disease pathogenesis and should be useful in the design of experiments aiming at a systematic analysis of the specificity of clones present in psoriatic plaques.