Maternal Adaptive Immune Cells in Decidua Parietalis Display a More Activated and Coinhibitory Phenotype Compared to Decidua Basalis

Figure 4

Decidua parietalis contains more activated T cells than basalis. (a) CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T cells were gated according to the expression of CD45RA and CCR7 (gating strategy in (b)) and divided into naïve, central memory (CM), effector memory (EM), or terminally differentiated (TD) subsets (). (c) Representative histograms showing the expression of the indicated extracellular markers on decidua basalis and parietalis compared to the fluorescent minus one (FMO) control. Comparisons between decidua basalis and parietalis CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T cells regarding the expression of CD69 (d), CD25 (e), HLA-DR (f), CD127^high (g), CXCR3 (h), and CCR6 (i) ((d, e) and (i) , (f, g) , (h) ). (j) Paired mononuclear cells from basalis () and parietalis () were stimulated for 5 hours with PMA/ionomycin or left unstimulated. Data on cells from healthy controls (PBMC) were included as controls (). Intracellular expression of interferon-γ (IFN-γ) and granzyme B (GrzB) was determined by flow cytometry. T cells were divided into CD4⁺ (upper left) and CD8⁺ (upper middle), representative contour plots below the respective cell subset. GrzB was measured in unstimulated samples only (upper right), representative histograms shown in the bottom right corner. Line in graphs depicts the median among values. Comparisons between the paired samples were made using the nonparametric Wilcoxon test. ns = not significant; ; ; .

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