Fig. 1: Construction of a molecular sc-atlas of the human brain vasculature and reactivation of fetal programmes in pathological brain vascular ECs.
From: Single-cell atlas of the human brain vasculature across development, adulthood and disease
a, Schematic of the experimental workflow including scRNA-seq, computational analysis summary and validation experiments. b, Expression heat map of the top ranking marker genes in the indicated tissues. For the colour scale, red shows high expression, white shows intermediate expression and blue shows low expression. c–f, Dotplot heatmap of the fetal versus adult/control brain endothelium (c); pathological (path.) versus adult/control brain endothelium (d); brain vascular malformations (brain vasc. mal.) versus adult/control brain endothelium (e); and brain tumours versus adult/control brain endothelium (f) signatures based on differential gene expression analyses. g–n, IF imaging of tissue sections from the indicated entities, stained for PLVAP (red; g–j), ESM1 (red; k–n) and CD31 (green). Nuclei are stained with DAPI (blue). The arrowheads indicate expression of PLVAP or ESM1 in blood-vessel ECs in the different tissues, and the arrows indicate the absence of expression in blood-vessel ECs in the different tissues. For g–n, scale bars, 50 μm. o, The overlap between the 2,313 significant pathways enriched in fetal brain ECs as compared to adult/control brain ECs and the 1,409 significant gene sets enriched in pathological brain ECs as compared to adult/control brain ECs. ECM, extracellular matrix; NVL, neurovascular link; periph., periphery; RPCA, reciprocal principal component analysis; UMAP, uniform manifold approximation and projection.
