Fig. 3: Circulating Tax⁺ CD68⁺ immune cells were uncovered distinctively in aGVHD peripheral blood, mainly DC and monocytes.

A The two histograms visualize the intensities of HTLV-1-specific Tax signal in CD45⁺ populations (Fig. S1) from the two groups of PBMC samples. In aGVHD group, PBMCs from three aGVHD patients were collected at two-time points, T1 and T2, between onset and death. Ten patients in the control group received liver transplants and their PBMCs were collected at one postoperative time point when the complication occurred. PBMCs from aGVHD patients show high levels of HTLV-1 Tax expression. B t-SNE dimensional reduction was performed on CD45⁺ cells to explore the heterogeneity across patients. The color scale indicates the arcsinh-transformed signal intensity of Tax. The clusters with positive Tax expressions are marked through manual gating (red circles), primarily presented in the aGVHD group. C PhenoGraph and t-SNE depict the clustering result with 30 clusters identified automatically. The aGVHD group displays distinct cluster distributions from the control group. The Tax⁺ subpopulations are marked with hollow red circles (Table S6). D A heatmap depicts the median expression of cell markers in the seven Tax⁺ subpopulations. The HLA-DR⁺ subpopulations are marked by a hollow red rectangle. The color bars indicate arcsinh-transformed signal intensities of the proteins. E Percentages of the seven Tax⁺ subpopulations in CD45⁺ cells were compared between the aGVHD and control groups. Tax⁺ cells are presented mainly in the aGVHD group. (Intermediate monocyte: iMo; non-classical monocyte: ncMo; Conventional dendritic cell: cDC; CD8⁺ T cell.).