Fig. 4: Tumor cells within the invasive niche harbor epithelial collective migration features.

a Unsupervised clustering of the tumor cell subpopulations represented as a UMAP plot. b Average expression level of the difference between the spatial T^INF and spatial T^NOD signature scores in tumor cell subpopulations of the scRNA-seq dataset, represented as a color scale overlaid on the UMAP plot. c UMAP illustrating the unsupervised clusters ranked according to their mean difference between the spatial T^INF and spatial T^NOD signature scores in tumor cell subpopulations of the scRNA-seq dataset. d Average expression level of the difference between the spatial T^INF and spatial T^NOD signature scores in tumor cell subpopulations of the scRNA-seq dataset, represented as violin plots per ranked cluster. e Average expression of the “basal” and “differentiation” signatures in tumor cell subpopulations of the scRNA-seq dataset, represented as a color scale overlaid on the UMAP plot (left panels) and as violin plots per ranked cluster (right panels). f Average expression level of the “collective migration” and “Hallmark of epithelial to mesenchymal transition” signatures in tumor cell subpopulations of the scRNA-seq dataset, represented as a color scale overlaid on the UMAP plot (left panels) and as violin plots per ranked cluster (right panels). g Pseudotemporal trajectory across tumor cell subpopulations, starting point in Low infiltrative cluster TC1 (upper panel). Expression of spatial T^NOD (MPPED1, PTCH1) and spatial T^INF (KRT6A, SFN) markers along the pseudotemporal trajectory of tumor cell subpopulations (lower panels). h Expression of basal (DST, COL17A1) markers along the pseudotemporal trajectory of tumor cell subpopulations. i Expression of differentiation (KRT1, CALML5), tight junction (CLDN4), adherens junction (NECTIN1), and desmosomal junction (DSG3) markers along the pseudotemporal trajectory of the tumor cell subpopulations. scRNA-seq single-cell RNA sequencing, huBCC human basal cell carcinoma, UMAP uniform manifold approximation and projection, T^INF infiltrative tumor, T^NOD nodular tumor, TC tumor cluster.