Stimulating T cells with HHV8 (K8) peptide pool releases downstream cytokines and upregulates activation markers, enabling antigen-specific T cells to be detected or isolated for analysis. HHV8 (K8) peptide pool is a lyophilised mixture of 57 peptides from protein K8 alpha of human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8), and consists of 15-mer peptides with 11-amino-acid overlaps that cover amino acids 1 to 237 on K8. A basic leucine zipper (bZip) protein that associates with the lytic origin of HHV8 (Lin et al.), K8 is thought to play a role in lytic DNA replication, as a trans-acting factor (AuCoin et al.). It has also been found to modulate the activity of the transcriptional transactivator K-Rta (Izumiya et al.), and has an autoregulatory function (Wang et al.). Viral peptide pools are useful for a broad range of applications, including vaccine development, immunological research, and diagnostic assay development.