Fig. 2.

Stimulation of cytokine production upon challenge of PBMCs from healthy donors to different yeasts strains. (A–B) Individual cytokine patterns for S. cerevisiae strains isolated from IBD patients (n ​= ​7) and healthy donors (n ​= ​6). PBMC T-polarizing (A) and pro-inflammatory (B) cytokine release from HS (white boxplots) and CD patients (black boxplots), upon stimulation with 9 selected S. cerevisiae strains (indicated in horizontal axis). In each scatter-plot, red points represent CD patient PBMC cytokine release after stimulation with their own isolate. +mi and -mi indicate the yeast was isolated when the corresponding patients had mucosal inflammation or not mucosal inflammation, respectively. * indicate significant differences between the cytokine levels expressed by healthy subjects’ or CD′ PBMCs (Wilcoxon p ​< ​0.05). (C–D) Statistics of Spearman correlations among levels of cytokines produced by (C) PBMCs from healthy donors and (D) patients in response to S. cerevisiae isolates. (E) Correlations among cytokine levels by CD patients and healthy donors. The color in each square indicates the Spearman correlation r among the variables reported in the two coordinates, as indicated by colored scale bar. Crossed squares lack of statistical significance (p ​> ​0.05). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)