Fig. 1

ApoE deficiency promotes CD4⁺ T-cell activation and skin allograft rejection. a–b Representative images (a) and percentage of spleen weight corrected for body weight (b) from WT and apoE KO mice. c–d Frequency of CD4⁺ (c) and CD8⁺ (d) T-cells subsets in the spleen of WT and apoE KO mice. e Frequency of CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ activated CD44^hi CXCR3⁺ T cells in the spleen of WT and apoE KO mice. f Graphic representation of a typical skin allograft transplantation experiment: a piece of tail skin from C57BL/6K^d donor was transplanted on the back of WT or apoE KO mice and graft survival was scored up to 3 weeks. g Graft survival following skin allotransplantation. Survival of less than 50% of the donor skin was recorded as rejection. h Number of CD4⁺ T cells infiltrating the lymph nodes (axillary and brachial) draining (dLNs) and (contra-lateral inguinal) non-draining (ndLNs) the graft, corrected for LNs weight. i–j Number of activated CD4⁺ T cells CD44^hi (i) and CD44^hi CXCR3⁺ (j) in the dLNs after allograft rejection; representative dot plots are shown. k–l Migratory response of T lymphocytes isolated from draining lymph nodes, after allograft rejection, to the chemokines CXCL10 (k) and CCL19/21 (l) measured by transwell. N = 4 (g–l) or 6 (a–e) per group. Statistical analysis was performed with unpaired T-test (b, i, j), Gehan-Breslow-Wilcoxon test (g) and two-way Anova (c–e, h, k, l). Data are reported as mean ± SEM; *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01