Fig. 7: NOTCH pathway is the target signaling for MCs expressional and functional changes after disc injury.

a Schematic of the TMJ disc injury mouse model and integrated single-cell transcriptomic analyses using both normal and injured disc cells. b Dimension reduction presentation (via UMAP) of integrated single-cell transcriptome data for all disc samples. Each dot represents a single cell and is labeled by different color depths according to stage and injury condition. c Dimension reduction presentation (via UMAP) of integrated single-cell transcriptome data for normal disc cells (in grey) and injured disc cells (in red). Each dot represents a single cell, the retained cell number is 46827. d Proportion of inferred signaling interaction numbers in normal and injured TMJ disc cells. e Proportion of signaling interaction strength in normal and injured TMJ disc cells. f UMAP plot of MC subpopulations according to the Methods. Each dot represents a single cell and is labeled by different color depths according to stage and injury condition. g Stacked bar graph of outgoing and incoming information flow for each signaling pathway associated with mural cells of 3d and injury TMJ disc datasets. h Stacked bar graph of outgoing and incoming information flow for each signaling pathway associated with mural cells of 3w and injury TMJ disc datasets. i Stacked bar graph of outgoing and incoming information flow for each signaling pathway associated with mural cells of 16w and injury TMJ disc datasets. j Stacked bar graph of outgoing and incoming information flow for each signaling pathway associated with mural cells of 78w and injury TMJ disc datasets.