Fig. 5: Migracytosis-defective mice are resistant to TcdB3.

a Survival of WT and Tspan9^‒/‒ mice after IP injection of TcdB3 (0.4 μg/kg) illustrated by the Kaplan–Meier curves (monitored for 3 days). b Survival of WT and Tspan9^‒/‒ mice after IP injection of Tcnα (0.4 μg/kg) illustrated by the Kaplan–Meier curves (monitored for 3 days). c Survival of WT and Tspan9^‒/‒ mice after IP injection of TcdB1 (0.4 μg/kg) illustrated by the Kaplan-Meier curves (monitored for 3 days). d Volcano plot illustrating differentially expressed genes in liver tissues of the Tspan9^‒/‒ mice vs the WT mice under TcdB3 treatment. Liver tissues were collected 2 h after IP injecting TcdB3 (0.4 μg/kg). The plot highlights several representative genes significantly altered related to acute inflammation or chemokines, with a threshold set at |fold change (FC)| ≥ 2 and P value > 0.05. e The bubble plot illustrates the results of Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis performed using the Metascape web tool for the gene set of significantly down-regulated genes in the Tspan9^‒/‒ group. The analysis was conducted with a significance threshold set at P < 0.05. f Monocyte numbers in mouse whole blood were calculated 2 h or 9 h after TcdB3 IP injection. n = 4–10. The P values were calculated using two-way ANOVA followed by Bonferroni’s test. g Intravital imaging of mouse liver IP injected with TcdB3 (0.6 μg/kg) or not. WGA-AF488 labels liver sinusoids. Neutrophils are labeled with an anti-mouse Ly-6G/Ly-6C-PE antibody. Scale bar, 10 μm. h Quantification of WGA signal intensity and neutrophil number per field and per time-point from g. Data are presented as mean ± SEM and 10 fields from two mice are randomly selected in each group.