Stimulating T cells with CMV (IE-2) Peptide pool releases downstream cytokines and upregulates activation markers, enabling antigen-specific T cells to be detected or isolated for analysis. CMV (IE-2) Peptide pool is a lyophilised mixture of 143 peptides from immediate early protein 2 (IE2) of human cytomegalovirus (CMV; strain AD169), and consists of 15-mer peptides with 11-amino-acid overlaps that cover amino acids 1 to 580 on IE2. IE2 is critical for viral infection and for the expression of CMV early genes (Marchini et al.). It also controls transcription initiation for a subset of early-late and late viral promoters via RNA polymerase II (Li et al.). IE2, along with IE1, may contribute to the survival of CMV-infected cells by blocking tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α)-induced apoptosis (Zhu et al.). Viral peptide pools are useful for a broad range of applications, including vaccine development, immunological research, and diagnostic assay development.