Fig. 1

ScRNA-seq identifies distinct cell subpopulations in the early and late passages. a The strategy for chondrocyte passaging and the scRNA-seq workflow. b T-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) plotting of 4 chondrocyte clusters by Seurat unsupervised clustering; ProC proliferative cluster, EcmC extracellular matrix (ECM) cluster, MetC metabolic cluster, DegC degradative cluster. c t-SNE projection of cells and representative markers in 4 clusters. d Percentages of 4 clusters in different passages. e Heatmap of cluster-specific genes. f Relative expression level and percentage of representative markers in 4 clusters. g Enriched Gene Ontology (GO) terms in 4 clusters.