Fig. 1: Global expression profiling of human corpus cavernosum cells in normal male and ED patients by single-cell RNA-seq.

a Schematic illustration of the experimental workflow in this study. b t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding (tSNE) plots of all corpus cavernosum cells from eight donors (three normal males and five ED patients). Cells are coloured according to their types (left panel) or state (right panel; red = Normal, blue = Erectile dysfunction). c Expression patterns of the following marker genes for each cluster are projected on the tSNE plot of all CC cells: VWF (endothelial cells), PDGFRA (fibroblast), KCNJ8 (pricytes), ACTA2 (smooth muscle cells), S100B (Schwann cells), CD163 (macrophages) and CD3E (T cells). A gradient of light grey to dark red indicates low to high expression levels. d Heatmap of the top 30 DEGs in each major cluster (left panel), with the GO analysis (biological process) according to the DEGs of each major cluster shown as a bubble diagram (right panel). A gradient of light blue to dark red indicates low to high expression levels in the heatmap. Statistical analysis was based on Fisher’s exact test; two-tailed; the confidence interval is 95%. A gradient of red to grey indicates low to high P-values in the bubble diagram and the size of the bubbles indicates the count of enriched DEGs for each GO term. e Cell–cell communication signalling network among the seven major clusters analysed with CellChat. The width of the lines indicates the number of pairs. Different colours represent different signal sources. The right panel showed that cell clusters were located based on the count of their significant incoming (Y-axis) or outgoing (X-axis) signalling pattern.