Fig. 2

Effect of PHA-stimulation on intra-T cell metabolites concentration. T lymphocytes were purified from eight healthy donors’ blood. Cells were cultured in complete RPMI medium at a concentration of one million cells/mL and were stimulated with 4 μg/mL PHA (grey box) or left unstimulated (NS, white box). After a 40-h incubation, one million T cells were aliquoted and intra-lymphocyte lactate and pyruvate concentrations measured. Results are expressed as the concentration of lactate (Fig. 2a) or pyruvate (Fig. 2b) per well of the lecture plate, which contains 50 μL of the obtained cell lysate, or as the lactate/pyruvate ratio (Fig. 2c), which is known to reflect anaerobic metabolism when exceeding 10 (horizontal dotted line). Each point represents the mean of the duplicates for each donor. Data are also presented as Tukey boxplots. Bottom and top of the box represent the first and third quartiles, respectively. The horizontal bar in the box represents the median value. Lower and higher extremities of the whiskers respectively represent the lowest datum still within 1.5 inter-quartile range (IQR) of the lower quartile, and the highest datum still within 1.5 IQR of the upper quartile. Difference between NS and PHA groups was assessed with Wilcoxon test