Figure 3. Single cell RNA-seq analyses demonstrate that a low dose prime favors central memory CD8 T cell differentiation.

Mice were immunized with 10⁶ or 10⁹ PFU of Ad5-SARS-2 spike, and at day 28, splenic CD8 T cells were MACS-sorted. Subsequently, live, CD8+, CD44+, K^b VL8+ cells were FACS-sorted to ~99% purity for scRNA-seq. (A) UMAP plots showing populations colored by regimen (left plot). Standard and low dose cells were cluster separately and UMAP (right plot) shows unsupervised cell clusters. (B) Heatmap showing row-standardized expression of selected effector and memory genes (middle rows) or gene signatures (bottom rows). For each population, percentages of cells in each cluster are indicated (top row). (C) Violin plot showing the normalized expression of the Terminal Effector signature in the Standard and Low dose populations.