Fig. 1

Transcriptional analysis of CD8⁺ T cells from peripheral blood and decidua. a Gating strategy of CD8⁺T cells from maternal peripheral blood and decidua, CD8⁺T cells were gated from live CD3⁺, CD56⁻, and CD4⁻ cells. Fluorescence-activated cell sorting was performed to purify the CD8⁺T cells by this gating strategy; b Left: Percentage of CD4⁺T cells and CD8⁺T cells in CD3⁺T cells from paired PBMC and decidua. n = 4, paired t⁻test, *p = <0.05 **p = <0.01; Right: Ratio of frequencies of CD4 versus CD8 from PBMC and decidua. c Volcano plot representation of differential expression analysis of genes; Red and blue points mark the genes with significantly increased or decreased expression, respectively, in samples of CD8⁺dT cells compared with samples of CD8⁺pT cells (FDR < 0.01). The x-axis shows fold-changes (log2) in expression, and the y-axis shows the log p value of a gene being expressed differentially. In both data sets, Smchd1 is the top-ranked gene. Blue dots are downregulated genes, and red dots are upregulated genes, of CD8⁺dT cells compared with CD8⁺pT cells; d Heatmap result of an unsupervised hierarchical clustering of genes that is significantly different (p < 0.01) in CD8⁺dT cell samples compared with CD8⁺pT cell samples. Each column represents a patient (blue: CD8⁺pT, red: CD8⁺dT), and each row represents a gene. The heatmap indicates the level of row normalized gene expression. Red = high expression; Green = low expression