Co-culture of synovial tissue dendritic cells with autologous peripheral blood memory T-Cells across Active and Remission RA

To dissect the precise roles of ST-DC2 clusters and ST-iDC3 clusters in T-cell activation, we co-cultured each cluster separately with autologous memory CD4pos T-cells. FACS-sorted ST-DC2 clusters and ST-iDC3 clusters from synovial tissue of active RA or remission RA were co-cultured for 5 days with FACS-sorted autologous blood memory CD4pos T-cells in the presence of anti-CD3 stimulation to mimic TCR activation. We investigated the frequency and phenotype of the resultant co-culture T-cell populations by carrying out single cell sequencing and analysing the output. It was observed that the DC2 and iDC3 group could differentially support distinct T-Cell populations in both frequency, and transcriptional profile.