Fig. 6: Prostate cancer is characterized by T-cell exhaustion and immunosuppressive Treg activity. | Nature Communications

Fig. 6: Prostate cancer is characterized by T-cell exhaustion and immunosuppressive Treg activity.

From: Dissecting the immune suppressive human prostate tumor microenvironment via integrated single-cell and spatial transcriptomic analyses

Fig. 6

a Joint embedding showing the detailed annotation of lymphoid subpopulations. b Dotplot representing key-marker gene expression in lymphoid subpopulations. The color represents the scaled average expression of marker genes in each subpopulation, and the size indicates the proportion of cells expressing marker genes. c Boxplots represent the average expression of exhaustion score in CD8+ CTLs subpopulations (CTL-1 n = 37, CTL-2 n = 36 and CD8+ effector cells n = 35). Statistics are accessed with two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum test (CTL-1 vs. CTL-2 ****p = 3.32E-06; CTL-2 vs. CD8 + effector ****p = 1.61E-06). d Boxplots comparing the average expression of exhaustion score in CTL-1 (left) and CD8 + effector (right) subpopulations across healthy (n = 5), adj-normal (n = 14) and tumor (n = 18) samples. Statistics are accessed with two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum test (*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001), p values could be found in Supplementary Data 6. e Boxplots represent the average expression of cytotoxicity score in CD8 + CTLs (CD8 + effector cells, CTL-1 and CTL-2) in cold tumors including prostate cancer (PCA n = 18) and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC n = 19), and in hot tumors including Head and Neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC n = 26), liver hepatocelluar carcinoma (LIHC n = 8) and lung cancer (lung n = 10). Statistical significance was accessed using two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum test (*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001; ****p < 0.0001), p values could be found in Supplementary Data 6. f Boxplot represents the average expression of Treg activity gene signature in Treg subpopulation across the three different samples. Significance was assessed using two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum test (Tumor vs. adj-normal *p = 0.013; Tumor vs. Healthy *p = 0.015). Boxplots in c–f include centerline, median; box limits, upper and lower quartiles; and whiskers are highest and lowest values no >1.5× interquartile range. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

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