Function of B cells within tertiary lymphoid structures in ovarian cancer
(A and B) (A) Proportions and (B) cell numbers of cell subtypes in TLS-low (n = 3; 18,354 cells) ovarian tumors compared with TLS-high (n = 2; 5,996 cells) ovarian tumors.
(C) UMAP showing five B cell subtypes in ovarian tumors. Cell cluster annotation for (C–F): naive cells, memory cells, plasma cells (PCs), germinal center (GC), and plasmablasts.
(D) Marker genes in the five B cell subtypes. Yellow indicates high expression and purple indicates low expression.
(E) Dot plot showing marker genes in five B cell subtypes comparing TLS-high with TLS-low tumors. Blue represents cells from the TLS-high group, gray represents cells from the TLS-low group.
(F) IGHG4 expression across B cell subtypes. The p-values are given by Wilcoxon rank-sum test. ∗∗∗∗p < 0.0001; ∗∗∗p < 0.001; ns, p > 0.05.
(G and H) Concentrations of ovarian tumor-derived (G) IgG and (H) IgA comparing TLS-high (n = 63) with TLS-low tumors (n = 35) from the HH cohort.
(I and J) (I) Somatic hypermutation of CDR3 sequences and (J) IgG3-to-IgG1 subclass switching rate comparing TLS-high (n = 57) with TLS-low tumors (n = 170) in the TCGA ovarian cancer cohort. For (G)–(J), the p values are given by two-tailed t test. For boxplot, elements are defined as follows: the center line indicates median value, box limits indicate upper and lower quartiles, whiskers extend to 1.5× the interquartile range, and points beyond the whiskers are outliers.