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. 2018 Jun 11;9:1319. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2018.01319

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Divergent T cell activation and exhaustion profiles in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients based on non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) infection status. (A) Flow cytometric analysis of ex vivo CD4+ T cells show significant differences in Treg percentages and marker expression between patient groups. Significantly more Tregs were seen in both CFAct and CFPast groups compared to CFContro1 (one-way ANOVA with post-hoc testing P = 0.013 and P = 0.042, respectively). Significantly higher CD25+ CD4+ T cells were observed in both CFAct and CFPast groups compared to CFContro1 group (P = 0.0056 and P = 0.037, respectively). CD25 cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) double-positive T cells were significantly higher in CFAct than in CFControl (P = 0.019). A reciprocal reduction in CD25 CTLA-4 double-negative CD4+ T cells were seen in CFAct, CFPast, and HCA groups compared to CFControl (P = 0.001, P = 0.027, and P = 0.008, respectively). CFAct patient with active Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) infection is shown as a blue circle in scatter plots. This data point was not included in the ANOVA analysis but is shown here to demonstrate activation and exhaustion profile of a patient with an active NTM infection that is not MABS (B) Immune marker profiling of CD4+ T cells by SPICE showed differences in ex vivo phenotype in the CFContro1 group compared to CFAct (P = 0.0002), CFPast (P = 0.0002), and HCA (P = 0.005). PMA/I stimulation resulted in minor changes in maker profile with the CFControl profile still being significantly different to CFAct (P = 0.025) and CFPast(P > = 0.018) though the difference with HCAwas reduced (P = 0.057). (C) SPICE dot plots show expression levels of all combinations of markers CD25, CTLA-4, and programmed cell death protein 1 in CD4+ T cells both ex vivo and after PMA/I stimulation in CF patient and control groups. Groups with significantly different expression compared to HCA (Wilcoxon rank test P < 0.05) are indicated with # symbol. Symbol color indicates significantly different group.