Fig. 2.

Ex vivo B-cell activation with IL-17+BAFF+CpG led to increased mature B-cell phenotypes. (A) Hierarchical clustering and heatmap of five B-cell markers (CD19, CD38, CD27, CD138, and IgD) show clustering of ex vivo cultured B-cell populations according to marker expression levels. Normalized Z-scores are displayed as colorimetric scale from blue to red. (B) tSNE maps of viable B (CD45⁺CD19⁺) cells from two healthy volunteers cultured ex vivo: unstimulated cells (top panel); IL-17+BAFF+CpG stimulated cells (bottom panel). (C–D) Violin plots showing B-cell populations after stimulation with IL-17+BAFF+CpG compared with no stimulation after 14 days in culture (data from two healthy volunteers, each experiment was run in duplicate). Circulating B cells were extracted from a healthy volunteer with detectable circulating autoantibodies against FOLR (Healthy volunteer A; C) and from a healthy volunteer with no detectable serum autoantibodies against FOLR (Healthy volunteer B; D).