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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2021 Mar 1.
Published in final edited form as: J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2019 Jul 15;145(3):968–981.e14. doi: 10.1016/j.jaci.2019.07.004

Figure 1. B lymphocytes drive pro-fibrotic genes expression and collagen production by human pancreatic fibroblasts by means of soluble factors.

Figure 1.

(A) Top results of GSEA performed on log2 fold changes between gene expression of fibroblasts co-cultured with B cells from patients with IgG4-RD AIP in the absence of semipermeable membranes and of control fibroblasts at 72hrs (see Online Supplementary Material for details). The network graph shows top scoring enriched gene-sets (FDR q-value <0.01) and their associated leading edge genes (those responsible of the core enrichment of the gene-set). Nodes representing genes are coloured according to their log2 fold change and genes considered of particular interest are labelled. (B) Quantitative PCR showing fold change expression of ACTA2, COL1A1, COL1A2, and COL3A1 genes in pancreatic fibroblasts after 3 days co-culture with B lymphocytes from patients with IgG4-RD AIP (n=5) and from healthy donors (n=5). (C) Collagen concentration in the supernatant of different experimental conditions. Human pancreatic fibroblasts (FBL); FBL treated with TGFβ1 20ng/ml (TGFβ); FBL co-cultured with B cells from healthy controls (blue bars); FBL co-cultured with B cells from patients with IgG4-RD (red bars) in the presence (Transwell) or absence (Contact) of semipermeable membranes. * = p < 0.05 for the comparison with fibroblasts alone; ° = p < 0.05 for the comparison with co-cultures in the presence of B cells from healthy controls. Results are expressed as mean ± SD of 5 experiments.