Fig. 4: Invasions are clustered at hotspots associated with the presence of pericytes.

a Distribution of blood vessel invasions (BVI, white circles) along the cutaneous microvasculature. Clusters of BVI are indicated by red dotted circles, vessels and sporozoites appear in white. Bar, 20 µm. b Frequency distribution of the distance between sites of BVI and their nearest neighbor for clustered (CL) and non-clustered (NCL) invasions. c Frequency distribution of the distance between sites of BVI and the nearest vascular branching points. d Distance between the sites of BVI and nearest branching points for CL (blue) and NCL (red) invasions. Two-tailed Mann–Whitney test. e Distribution of CD146⁺ (green) CD31⁻ (red) pericytes (arrowheads) and clustered BVI (white circles). Bar, 10 µm. f Frequency distribution of the distance separating sites of BVI from the nearest pericyte body. g Distance between sites of BVI and the nearest pericyte body in CL (blue circles) and NCL (red circles) populations, or half of the distance between two adjacent pericyte bodies (Peri/2, green circles). Kruskal–Wallis with Dunn’s multiple comparison test. h Schematic representation of BVI and pericyte distribution. Blue: CL BVI, red: NCL BVI, green: pericyte. i Search strategy of sporozoites to intravasate into the dermal microvasculature. HMM: Hidden Markov Model, INV: invader, NINV: non-invader. Created with BioRender.com. d, g Lines denote the median, crosses the mean, and whiskers the spread of the dataset. Pooled data from five independent experiments yielding 64 BVI events for (b) and from 13 independent experiments for (c, d) and (f–h) analyzing respectively 91 (c, d) and 74 (f–h) BVI. Pericyte coverage (g, h) was quantified over 10 independent fields containing a total of 47 pericytes. Panels (a) and (e) are representative of 5 and 13 experiments, respectively. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.