Figure 1.

Characteristics of clonal T cell repertoire of synovial fluid from patients with SpA. Comparison of clonal diversity (species richness) (A) and oligoclonality (B) between PB and SF repertoires of SpA patients (by Wilcoxon signed-rank test). Oligoclonality is measured by Gini index that equals 0 in even distribution of frequencies and 1 in monoclonal sample. (C, D) Normalized number of shared clonotypes (i.e., having identical CDR3 amino acid sequence and TRBV-segment) per donor in total (C) or depending on the number of matched HLA alleles (D) between donors (Wilcoxon rank sum test). Each dot represents an individual sample. For patients with relapses only repertoires of time point 1 were included in the analysis. Values below the box plots denote the number of donors. The middle line of a box corresponds to the median, the lower and upper hinges correspond to the 25th and 75th percentiles, respectively. The upper and lower whiskers extends from the hinges to the largest and smallest values no further than 1.5 * IQR from the corresponding hinge. Top, middle and bottom panels correspond to the repertoires of total, CD8+ and CD4+ T cells respectively. To assess diversity and clonal sharing repertoires were in silico equalized to the same sequencing depth. PB - peripheral blood, SF - synovial fluid, HLA - human leukocyte antigen. *p < 0.05, ***p < 0.001, ****p < 0.0001.