TB patients have an increased proportion of atypical B-cells.

PBMCs were thawed and stained directly for several combinations of B-cell surface markers. Lines indicate the median values of all groups. Ethnicity of donors was indicated using the following symbols: ‘black circle’ = West Europe; ‘black diamond’ = Est Europe; ‘black square’ = Africa; ‘black triangle’ = Asia; ‘black star’ = Sud America. Mann-Whitney test was performed to compare infected groups to the uninfected controls and a p< 0.05 was considered significant. * marks differences that remained significant after multiple test correction using Kruskal-Wallis testing with Dunn’s post-test. A. Memory B cell subsets identified by concatenate analysis for CD27, CD21 and IgD on 17 control (grey), 14 LTBI (blue), 13 TB (red), 16 TB treated (green) individuals within the CD19⁺ B-cells. B. Memory B-cell subset distribution for CD21-CD27 (top row) and IgD-CD27 (bottom row) expressed as median of each group representing 28 controls, 22 LTBI individuals, 22 TB patients and 27 TB treated subjects. C. Atypical memory B-cells characterized by the absence of CD21 and CD27 (left panel) or the absence of IgD and CD27 for all individuals included in the study, expressed as percentage of total CD19⁺ B-cells, with a line at the median value. D. B-cell exhaustion markers CD85J (D), CD22 (E), FcRL4 (F) were measured on B-cells within total PBMCs and are expressed as percentage within the atypical memory B-cells.