Fig. 2: Small intestine reaction in COVID-19 patients is characterized by an epithelial increase of activated CD8+ T cells.

a Representative images of imaging mass cytometry (IMC) of control (upper row, n = 5 biological replicates) and COVID-19 (lower row, n = 5 biological replicates) patients. Shown is the expression of EpCAM (magenta), CD3 (green), CD31 (blue) and Ki67 (red). Nuclei are counterstained with Iridium (grey). Scale bars represent 100 µm. b Overlay of tSNE plots of all segmented cells of all samples. COVID-19 patients are indicated in blue, control patients in red. c Phenograph clustering (k nearest neighbor = 80) of the generated tSNE plots. Colors indicate different clusters. Clusters marked with numbers show significant changes in cell abundance in cell numbers of COVID-19 patients in comparison to controls. d Box plot of total cell numbers per phenograph cluster per sample (red, control; blue, COVID-19). Four differently abundant clusters (p < 0.05) are marked with an asterisk (*). Boxes extend from 25–75th percentile, the line depicts the median. Dots represent single values of single samples. e Heatmap of mean expression per marker (x-axis) of each defined phenograph cluster (y-axis). Significantly different abundant clusters are marked with an asterisk. Cluster designations are given on the left of the heatmap according to their marker expression (Suppl. Table 4).