Fig. 2: Voluntary running orchestrates the septic cardiac immune microenvironment.

A Schematic representation of the 10X Chromium scRNA-seq workflow used to analyze CD45⁺ immune cells isolated from the left ventricles of C57BL/6 mouse hearts. Mice were either sedentary (Sed) or exercise (Exe) and received intraperitoneal injections PBS or LPS. Figure created in BioRender, Shang, M. (2025) ly8ygbn. B Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) plot depicting 40,892 cardiac immune cells, colored according to cell type. C Dot plot displaying the top expressed genes in each cell population, compared to the other cell populations identified. D Proportions of different cell populations identified in each group. Box plot comparing the differences in the proportions of immune cell populations between the PBS (Sed) and LPS (Sed) (E), and LPS (Sed) and LPS (Exe) groups (F). Number of samples included in the analysis: PBS (Sed), n = 3; LPS (Sed), n = 3; LPS (Exe), n = 4. Data are represented as mean ± SEM. The lower whisker, lower hinge, box center, upper hinge, and upper whisker represent the minimum, lower quartile, median, upper quartile. Unpaired two-tailed t-test was used to determine the statistical significance. ns not significant. Source data for D, E, and F are provided in the Source Data file.