Fig. 1

Specific mRNA expression profile and heterogeneity of CD4+ TEM and TEMRA cells. a, b Heatmaps of genes with significantly increased expression in a T_EM/T_EMRA compared to T_N/T_CM cells and b T_EMRA compared with T_N/T_CM/T_EM cells identified by an intersection analysis. Gene expression was determined in human CD4⁺ T_N, T_CM, T_EM, and T_EMRA cells sorted from peripheral blood of healthy subjects (n = 3–8, each consisting of 1–3 pooled sorted samples). The scale of both heatmaps is identical. c Single-cell profiling of T_EM- and T_EMRA-specific gene expression shown as unsupervised hierarchical cluster analysis of 16 gene candidates (red) and additional genes (black) in single blood CD4⁺ T_EMRA (n = 226), T_EM (n = 199), T_CM (n = 186), T_N (n = 94), and Treg cells (n = 178) from four healthy donors. d Unsupervised hierarchical cluster analysis of single-cell gene expression results from identified natural killer cell-associated markers in blood CD4⁺ T_EM (n = 260) and T_EMRA (n = 276) cells of five healthy individuals. Classification as expressing and non-expressing cells based on individually defined limit of detection (LoD) Ct values. Data are provided with the Source Data file