Fig. 4: Evaluation of cell-to-cell communication potential between dendritic cells and T-cell subpopulations in lupus nephritis single cell data.

a Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) visualization of the lupus nephritis dataset. 22 clusters were previously identified by the authors and their annotations are displayed on the right. Cell identity of each cluster can be found in the original article²⁰. b ICELLNET framework applied on specific cluster to assess DC-T intercellular communication. Average expression profiles were computed from the single-cell data matrix counts for each cluster to then compute intercellular communication score. Barplots are displaying the contribution of the different communication molecules families to the communication scores. c Balloon plot representing specific individual interaction scores that differ from at least 10 between the two conditions (cutoff chosen for clarity purpose) for interaction belonging to either chemokine, checkpoint, or growth factor families of molecules. d Assessment of communication score variability when subsampling DC or T cluster. Cells were randomly selected for CT0a and CT3b cluster (left) or CM3 cluster (right) (number of cells selected according to their respective cluster size). Communication scores were computed with the other complete cluster (CM3 for left, T cell cluster for right). Standard deviations of the communication scores are displayed on the graphs (n = 20 random selection of cells). Some schematic art pieces were used and modified from Servier Medical Art, licensed under a Creative Common Attribution 3.0 Generic License. http://smart.servier.com/ (b).