Fig. 4: Identification of spatial signal transmission among glomerular cells in kidney.

a Slide-seq (v2) ST dataset of the mouse kidney involving 27044 spots and 20591 genes. CD-IC, collecting duct intercalated cells; CD-PC, collecting duct principal cells; DCT, distal convoluted tubules; Endo, endothelial cells; FB, fibroblasts; GC, granular cells; Macro, macrophages; MC, mesangial cells; PCT, proximal convoluted tubules; Pod, podocytes; TAL, thick ascending limb; vSMC, vascular smooth muscle cells. b Significantly enriched LRIs that mediate cell–cell communications among MC, Endo, and Pod inferred by SpaTalk with P < 0.05. The P-value represents the significance of spatial proximity of LRIs using the permutation test. Top 20 LRI pairs were plotted for Pod-Endo communications. c Significantly enriched Gene ontology (GO) biological processes determined with the Metascape web tool for the ligands and receptors from MC and Pod to Endo inferred by SpaTalk. d Spatial distribution of the Vegfa-Kdr pairs between the Pod senders and Endo receivers. e Number of Vegfa-Kdr pairs from Pod to Endo in space across other slides of mouse kidney. f Mouse kidney ST dataset generated from 10x Visium involving 3124 spots and 19465 genes and the reconstructed single-cell ST data by SpaTalk. The percent of MC, Endo, and Pod as well as the expression of the corresponding known markers were plotted. PT, proximal tubule; CNT, connecting tubule; LHDL, loop of Henle descending loop; LHAL, loop of Henle ascending loop. g Significantly enriched LRIs that mediate Pod-Endo communications. Top 20 LRIs (left) and spatial distribution of the Angpt1-Tek pairs between the Pod senders and Endo receivers were plotted. h Communications of Endo-MC mediated by the Pdgfb-Pdgfrb interaction in space and the spatial distances of Pdgfb-Pdgfrb in Endo-MC and all cell–cell pairs, respectively. P-value was calculated with the one-sided t-test. The numbers of data points (minima, 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile, and maxima) for the boxplots from left to right are 2,237,963 and 405,756, respectively.