Cu-IUD initiation recruits innate immune cells into the endocervix
Cu-IUD initiation
Since Cu-IUD initiation resulted in the highest significant changes in the FGT gene expression as compared to LNG implant and DMPA-IM, its influence on the immune cell populations was further investigated using digital flow cytometry methods (Cu-IUD initiation induces significant changes in the elements of innate immunity in endocervical tissue. (A) Workflow of in silico flow cytometry on RNA-seq data of women assigned to Cu-IUD. (B) Relative abundance of immune cell types in baseline and one month Cu-IUD samples using CIBERSORTx algorithm. (C) Hierarchical followed by k-means clustering of Cu-IUD samples according to the top significantly differentially abundant immune cell types. (D—F) The violin plots show the proportion of activated dendritic cells in samples collected at baseline and at one month, computed based on xCell and CIBERSORTx deconvolution algorithms. The two proportions were compared using Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney test. ** and *** represents q-values ≤0.01 and 0.001, respectively.