Fig. 5: Il21r deficiency diminishes trNK differentiation during decidualization. | Nature Communications

Fig. 5: Il21r deficiency diminishes trNK differentiation during decidualization.

From: IL-21R-STAT3 signalling initiates a differentiation program in uterine tissue-resident NK cells to support pregnancy

Fig. 5

a Flow cytometry showing uterine trNK differentiation in gd8.5 WT and Il21r-/- dams. b Percentages of uterine trNK subgroups in gd8.5 WT and Il21r-/- dams (n = 5 per group; **P = 0.0083, *P = 0.0111). c Cell number of each uterine trNK subgroup in gd8.5 WT and Il21r-/- dams at one implantation site (n = 5 per group; **P = 0.0076, ***P = 0.0009). d UMAP of uterine trNK from gd8.5 WT and Il21r-/- dams. Colors indicate different uterine trNK subgroups, ring pie charts show distribution of each subgroup, and dashed-line circles indicate uterine trNK deficits in Il21r-/- mice. e Percentage of each uterine trNK cluster in gd8.5 WT and Il21r-/- dams. f Proportion change of each uterine trNK subgroup between gd8.5 WT and Il21r-/- dams. g Pseudotime analysis of trNK#1 and trNK#2 (left) and ordering of the two subgroups along the trajectory (middle). Accordingly, these cells are divided into three refined subgroups. h Distribution of the refined trNK subgroups (f) in WT and Il21r-/- dams. Ring pie charts show the proportion of each subgroup. i Volcano plots depicting differentially expressed genes (log2 fold change > 0.25 and P-value < 0.05) between uterine trNK from gd8.5 WT and Il21r-/- dams. j GO enrichment of the upregulated genes in uterine trNK of WT versus Il21r-/- dams. k Split violin plots showing module scores of cytotoxicity-associated and ribosome-associated features in total trNK cells and each individual uterine trNK cluster from WT and Il21r-/- dams (n = 3816, 2733, 321, 392, 296, 292, 252, 185, 1181, 874, 730, 435, 1036, and 555 per group). Each box represents the interquartile range (IQR), horizontal line inside represents the median, and extend whiskers indicate 1.5 times of the IQR. Numbers indicate the percentages in each box. Data are shown as the mean ± SEM. P-values are calculated by two-sided unpaired t-test, *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001. Data are representative of at least three independent experiments (a–c) or two independent experiments (d–i). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

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