Fig. 1: A single cell atlas representing the bone marrow ecosystem of lower-risk (LR) MDS.

a FACS gating strategy for the sorting of hematopoietic and non-hematopoietic cell populations from bone marrow aspirates of LR-MDS patients at diagnosis for single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) (adapted from²⁶). Created in BioRender. Bian, Y. (2025) https://BioRender.com/0sa14pd. In order to obtain robust representation of all bone marrow cell subtypes in the scRNA-seq data, bone marrow cells were sorted into HSPCs (CD45⁺CD34⁺), myeloid cells (CD45⁺CD34^–CD33⁺/CD117⁺), non-myeloid lineage hematopoietic cells (CD45⁺CD34^–CD33^–/CD117^–), endothelial cells (CD45^–CD235a^–CD71^–CD31⁺) and non-endothelial bone marrow stromal cell (BMSCs) (CD45^–CD235a^–CD71^–CD31^–) fractions. The sorted cells were pooled into two populations and subjected to scRNA-seq, followed by integration of the data into a single dataset. b Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) plot of mononuclear cells from bone marrow aspirates, representing 47,950 cells from healthy donors (n = 4) and 57,478 cells from LR-MDS patients (n = 5). c Expression of cell-type identifying genes in NBM and LR-MDS across all bone marrow cell subtypes. Cell-type identifying genes are defined as the top 50 most upregulated genes in each cell type in NBM. d Expression of BMSC markers, HSPC markers and lymphocyte markers in NBM and LR-MDS.