Fig. 3.
Thymi of MG patients are infiltrated by Th cells and B cells. a Scaffold of the mass cytometry run of the peripheral immune compartment of MG patients and the corresponding maps of the thymic leukocyte landscape of MG patients and non-MG controls determined by flow cytometry. Heatmap below depicts FlowSOM clustering of thymus samples. b Violin plots showing frequency of FlowSOM-generated thymic immune clusters for MG patients and incidental non-MG mass lesions. c Force-directed layout depicting the network of B cells present in the thymus. Color coding indicates FlowSOM clustering into subpopulations as shown in the heatmap (right panel). MZ marginal zone, BMEM memory B. d Violin plots showing frequencies of different B cell subpopulations in the thymus of MG patients and non-MG controls. Pie charts depict the median frequency of peripheral and thymic B cell populations in MG patients. Violin plots contain a bold horizontal line depicting the respective group mean. If not indicated, differences between experimental groups were statistically not significant (p > 0.05) using a nonparametric Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon test with a false-discovery correction according to the Benjamini–Hochberg approach. *p < 0.05