Supplementary Figure 6: Phenotypic alterations of NKG2C+ NK cells.
From: Peptide-specific recognition of human cytomegalovirus strains controls adaptive natural killer cells
(a-b) Purified CD56dim NK cells from HCMV– donors were cultured for 14 days with peptide-pulsed RMA-S–HLA-E–LFA-3 cells in the presence of IL-15 alone or in combination with IL-12 plus IL-18. (a) Summaries of Syk, CD161, FcεR1γ, CD7, NKG2A, and DNAM-1 expression on viable NKG2C+ NK cells. Connected symbols represent individual donors (n=6 for FcεR1γ; n=8 for CD161, CD7, and DNAM-1; n=10 for NKG2A; n=12 for Syk in 2-5 independent experiments). Friedman test with Dunn’s post test. (b) Comparison of NKG2C– and NKG2C+ NK cells after 14 days of culture with VMAPRTLFL-pulsed RMA-S–HLA-E–LFA-3 cells in the presence of IL-15 and IL-12 plus IL-18. Connected symbols represent individual donors (n=6 for FcεR1γ; n=8 for educating-KIR, CD161, CD7, and DNAM-1; n=10 for CD2, Siglec-7, and NKG2A; n=12 for Syk in 2-5 independent experiments). Two-tailed Wilcoxon test. NS not significant, *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.005. (c-d) Gene expression analysis of sorted viable CD56+ NKG2C+ NK cells cultured in the presence of VMAPQSLLL-pulsed targets (n=3 donors) or VMAPRTLFL plus IL-12 plus IL-18 (n=5 donors) for 7 days. Heat maps of selected (c) adaptive NK cell signature genes and (d) activation and exhaustion markers based on z-scores of rlog-transformed read counts clustered by Pearson correlation and Ward minimum variance. Asterisk-marked genes indicate adjusted P < 0.05.
