Fig. 5: Glucocorticoid treatment attenuates cell proliferation by elevating IFN signaling.

a Proliferation scores⁵⁶ were estimated for all groups. b, c GSEA of type 1 interferon in C3 cells comparing UT to GCR (b) and GCR to GCNR (c) groups. d Beeswarm plot showing the expression of type 1 interferon in C3 among different groups. e Heatmap illustrating scaled expression of key genes in the type 1 interferon signaling pathway in C3 cells from the NC, UT, GCR and GCNR groups. f Heatmap showing scaled expression of cell cycle mediators in C3 of NC, UT, GCR and GCNR groups. g The expression of MYC in C3 is shown among groups. h The proliferation of RPS19-depleted, cord blood-derived erythroid cells treated with either IFNα or Dex alone, or their combination, assessed on day 4 of erythroid differentiation. Proliferation was normalized to the non-treated control cells. i Time course growth curves of patient-derived BM-CD34⁺ cells during erythroid differentiation, cultured either with Dex or IFNα alone, or their combination. Due to the limited cells available from the patients, we occasionally combined the patient samples together. j Representative FACS plots of CFSE staining in GCR patient-derived BM-CD34⁺ cells cultured either with Dex or IFNα alone or in their combination on day 8 of erythroid differentiation. k Quantification of (j). The MFI of each group of cells was normalized to that of non-treated control cells. For (h and k), the error bars represent the SEM and P values were determined using Student’s t tests. ***P < 0.001; **P < 0.01 and *P < 0.05. n = 3 biological replicates. For the beeswarm plots (a, d and g), each dot represents the expression value that was calculated by summing the log₂ transformed UMI of every gene within the gene set of a single cell. Diamonds represent mean expression values for each cluster, and boxes represent the median and quartiles. P values were determined using Wilcoxon rank sum tests. ****P ≤ 0.0001, ***P ≤ 0.001 and *P ≤ 0.05; ns, no significance. See also Supplementary Fig. S7 and Table S6.