Fig. 2

Module-Based Discovery of Metastasis-Primed Cancer Cell Subpopulations. a, b UMAP dimensionality reduction analysis was performed on tumor cells, and the distribution of eight mechanical subgroups in metastatic and primary lesions was displayed. c Evaluate the malignancy level of eight cancer cell subpopulations through CNV scoring, with macrophages (MPs) with less mutation load as negative control. d Cluster and reduce the dimensionality of cancer cells based on the module analysis model and compare them with the specific subtypes of metastatic lesions shown in (a, b); positive scoring cells under ‘Module 11’ are distributed in cancer cells 1/2/3, which better reflects the characteristics of metastatic cancer cells. e Analyzing the correlation between genes in the ‘Module 11’ gene set and the prognosis of colorectal cancer using a multifactorial Cox regression model in the TCGA-COAD dataset. f, g UMAP dimensionality reduction analysis was performed on tumor cells from 6 primary lesion tissues. The distribution of six subgroups in the primary lesions of metastatic patients and non-metastatic patients was displayed. h, i Analysis of the potential characteristics of six subpopulations of tumor cells using typical malignant features of tumor cells; the cancer cell 3 subgroup shows a clear tendency toward EMT