Figure 3.

Donors with diagnosed Long COVID show increased IL-2 responses to Spike, nucleocapsid and membrane peptides.

PBMCs were isolated from diagnosed Long COVID patients between 6-13 months after symptom onset. These PBMCs were stimulated with spike (A), nucleocapsid (B) or membrane (C) peptides. IL-2 responses were measured by fluorospot assay as spot forming units per million PBMCs. Unexposed (red), and PCR-positive samples at day 180 (cyan) are included from Figure 1. Results either show the entire Long COVID cohort (green) or those stratified by antibody serology as negative (blue) or positive (purple). Zero results are set as 0.1 to allow their inclusion on a log scale. Each condition was run in duplicate and an unstimulated control was subtracted to remove background cytokine production. L.O.D. = limit of detection. Significance calculated by Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA, with Dunn's multiple comparison test between every group.(For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)