Hypoxia enables B19 erythrovirus to yield abundant infectious progeny in a pluripotent erythroid cell line.

B19 may cause mild to severe clinical manifestations. Owing to the remarkable tropism of B19 for red blood cell progenitors, there is a lack of satisfactory cell lines fully permissive for B19. Because the local oxygen pressure may influence viral replication, we used hypoxia to improve the sensitivity of our infectivity assay in order to link B19 DNA detected by PCR to the presence of infectious B19 particles in plasma. Plasma samples and the WHO International Standard for B19 DNA detection by PCR were used to infect the pluripotent human erythroid cell line KU812F under different oxygen pressures. Specific human anti-B19 IgG was found to reduce infectivity. Low oxygen pressure led to higher yields of infectious B19 progeny and to a higher level of viral transcription than observed under normoxia. This sensitive infectivity assay is a promising model for studying B19 biology, identifying neutralising antibodies, and evaluating new virus inactivation methods.