Revisiting estimates of CTL killing rates in vivo

Recent experimental advances have allowed the estimation of the in vivo rates of killing of infected target cells by cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL). We present several refinements to a method applied previously to quantify killing of targets in the spleen using a dynamical model. We reanalyse data previously used to estimate killing rates of CTL specific for two epitopes of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) in mice and show that, contrary to previous estimates the “killing rate” of effector CTL is approximately twice that of memory CTL. Further, our method allows the fits to be visualized, and reveals one potentially interesting discrepancy between fits and data. We discuss extensions to the basic CTL killing model to explain this discrepancy and propose experimental tests to distinguish between them.