Fig. 6: Identification of the TFs implicated in rare mimetic TECs. | Nature Communications

Fig. 6: Identification of the TFs implicated in rare mimetic TECs.

From: Spatial cartography of human thymus enables the geopositioning of lineage transcription factors in rare mimetic thymic epithelial cells

Fig. 6: Identification of the TFs implicated in rare mimetic TECs.The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

a The schematic illustration depicts the identification of mimetic TFs (mimeTFs) expressed by mimetic TECs. The TEC spots on the spatial section at a bin 50 (~25 μm) resolution were determined using the expression of EPCAM. The TFs expressed within the spatial TEC spots were determined and then screened for the respective TF’s expression in scRNA-seq data of TECs. A majority voting strategy was used to stratify the identified TFs into the domains, and the TFs associated with the medulla were called mimeTFs. Created in BioRender. Chen, Y. (2026) https://BioRender.com/4jzktkg. b The stacked bar chart shows the percentage of spots expressing mimeTFs compared to all EPCAM spots within each sample. The colours in the bar chart indicate the sample. The grey colour represents the TFs identified from Stereo-CITE at bin 20, whereas the rest of the colours represent the samples that detected TF using Stereo-seq at bin 50. The labels highlighted in red are the TFs known in mTECs and mimetic TECs, and the TFs highlighted in blue are the mimeTFs found and verified in this study. c The niches are defined for the spatial multi-omics (Stereo-CITE) profiling of P:7w thymus, which included the information on abundance of 31 proteins coupled with whole transcriptomics at bin 20 (~10 μm) resolution. d The spatial distribution of EPCAM gene expression and the corresponding protein (CD326) abundance of the gene EPCAM in spatial multi-omics. F fetal, P paediatric.

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