Fig. 2: Form-deprivation myopia induces dynamic changes and alterations of the cell-cell communication network in murine scleral fibroblasts.

a Distribution of fibroblast subtypes expressed as a difference between FD-treated and FD-fellow sclera (two-sided chi-square test with Bonferroni correction for multiple testing). The X-axis indicates the subtypes corresponding to the uniform manifold approximation and projection plot. The Y-axis shows the log-transformed P-value obtained by the chi-square test between FD-treated and FD-fellow eyes’ scleral fibroblast subtypes. Positive values indicate a decrease, whereas negative values indicate an increase in the FD-treated eyes when compared with the FD-fellow eyes. b Heat map of the ECM outgoing (left) and incoming (right) of cell-cell interaction in all fibroblast subtypes. c Heat map of the outgoing (left) and incoming (right) cell-cell interaction signals of all fibroblast subtypes. The row indicates the relative strength of each interaction pathway. The column indicates the total interaction strength of each fibroblast subtype. d Ligand-receptor pairs of the ncWNT signalling pathway of all fibroblast subtypes. The relative contribution of each ligand-receptor pair of the ncWNT signalling pathway among all scleral fibroblast subtypes. e Expression profile of Wnt5a of ncWNT signalling in each subtype of fibroblast. f Expression profile of Wnt11 of ncWNT signalling in each fibroblast subtype. g Wnt5a mRNA level in FD-48h treated eyes and FD-48h fellow eyes (two-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test). h Information flow of each cell–cell interaction pathway in FD treatment for 24 h or 48 h. FD form deprivation. Data are expressed as mean ± SEM.