Fig. 2: A specialised vascular niche for mammary cancer cells during bone colonisation.

a 3D confocal image of DTCs (blue) in bone marrow. Bones were stained for DAPI (grey), EMCN (green) and CD31 (red). The image was transformed into a density plot that displayed voxel intensities in the CD31 and EMCN channels. Spatial gates were drawn to split the data set into phenotypically distinct components for volumetric reconstructions. Arterial vessels were defined by CD31^hiEMCN^– (red); Type H capillaries by CD31^hiEMCN^hi (yellow); Type L sinusoids by CD31^loEMCN^lo (green) (n = 4 mice). Scale bars: 100 µm. b, d, f Distance to the nearest arterial vessel (b), type L sinusoid (d) and type H vessel (f) of individual DTCs and random spots were binned in histogram format. c, e, g Bar charts showing the averages of distances to vessel subtypes. Individual dots are from metastases from different mice. A total of 1256 DTCs (b, c), 299 DTCs (d, e) and 1052 DTCs (f, g) were analysed in 16 (b, c), 4 (d, e) and 17 (f, g) mice, respectively. P values in (b), (d), (f) by two-sided Kolmogorov−Smirnov analysis, and in (c), (e), (g) by two-tailed unpaired t tests. All data reflect mean ± s.e.m. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.