Fig. 2

Autoreactive T cells in a cross-sectional cohort of RA patients. a Frequency of antigen-specific CD4+ T cells, recognising influenza, citrullinated CILP/FGB or citrullinated α-enolase peptides, is shown for all 14 patients longitudinally. Plotted are tetramer-positive cells per million CD4+ T cells. Cut-off for positivity is one tetramer-positive cell per million CD4+ T cells and marked with a dotted line. The frequencies detected at the three time points (t1, t2, t3) are connected with a continuous line for each patient and with a dotted line in case there were no cells detected at one or two out of the three time points. b + c) Phenotypic characterisation of antigen-specific CD4+ T cells according to (b) simultaneous or singular expression of CD45RA and CCR7 and (c) expression of CD25, CXCR3, CXCR5 and CCR6. Plotted are frequencies from all 42 experiments (three per patient) for influenza- (open circles) and citrulline-specific (closed circles, not included in c) as well as for CILP/FGB- (squares) and α-enolase- (triangles) specific T cells and the general CD4+ population (light grey diamonds). Due to the setup of the experiment which resulted in there being up to three individual data points per patient plotted for each of the different antigen-specific T cell populations, we did not perform any specific statistical analysis