Figure 6.
Gene expression analysis of cTfh population shows upregulation of activation, effector, and exhaustion markers in patients with pES. (A) Heat map showing differentially expressed genes in patients with pES (n = 4) compared with HCs (n = 4). (B) Volcano plot showing few upregulated and downregulated genes with fold change either >2 or <0.5 and P < .05 in patients with pES. (C) Heatmaps showing gene expression changes categorized based on gene annotation categories of T cells in patients with pES compared with control samples. (D) Bar plots showing plasma concentration of sCD40L, IL-21, IFN-γ, CXCL9, CXCL10, IL-12p40, IL-10, IL-18, IL-2, and IL-7 in healthy (n = 20) and pES (n = 22) samples. Data represent mean ± SEM values for each group. Mann-Whitney test for nonparametric samples and Student t test for parametric samples were performed for significance. *P < .05; **P < .01; ns, not significant.