Fig. 3
Variation in overlap and similarity between blood T cell subsets and LSG T cell clones. (a) LSG and FACS sorted blood T cell subsets were obtained from three patients with pSjD (n = 3) and TCR sequencing was performed. (b) Rank and frequencies of top 100 T cell clones are shown. X-axis represents the rank of clones in log10 scale. Y-axis represents the frequency of clones in log10 scale. The extent of clonal expansion varied among patients, with Patient 1 showing the most clonal expansion and the highest frequency of expanded clones. Across all three patients, LSG infiltrating T cells (black), cTh1(red), and cTfh1(yellow) with cTfh2(blue) cells among cTfh subsets appeared as highly expanded T cell clones, with a sharp decline observed from the higher ranking clone to lower ranking clones. (c) Frequency of the LSG major T cell clones (Top50) overlapping with each blood T cell subset. Their frequencies in the blood subset (top) or in the LSG (bottom) were plotted. cTh1, cTfh1, and cTfh2 cells have more overlapping T cell clones with LSG T cells than other subsets. (gray color: Th1, Th17, black color: Tfh1, Tfh2, Tfh17, white color: Treg). (d) Heatmap of repertoire similarity between LSG and blood T cell subsets. Repertoire similarity was calculated as F2 score: the sum of geometric means of overlapping clone’s frequencies in two TCR repertoires (Reference 46, Supplementary method). The values on the heatmap indicate each F2 score. LSG T cells, cTh1 cells, and cTfh1 cells were clustered in a closer group compared to the other T cell subsets across all three patients.
