Fig. 2: Inter-tissue heterogeneity and AV zonation of brain vascular ECs.
From: Single-cell atlas of the human brain vasculature across development, adulthood and disease
a, UMAP plot of the 243,521 integrated/batch corrected fetal, adult/control and pathological brain ECs across 5 (fetal), 9 (adult/control) and 29 (pathological) individuals (Supplementary Table 3), colour coded by EC AV specification, and UMAP plots split by tissue of origin: fetal brain (5 individuals), adult/control brain (9 individuals) and brain pathologies (29 individuals). b–d, The relative abundance of EC subtypes (AV specification cluster) from the indicated tissue of origin. b–d are coloured according to the colour code in a (Supplementary Table 10). The number of individuals analysed was as follows: n = 43 (all entities), n = 5 (fetal brain), n = 9 (adult/control brain (TL)), n = 29 (all pathological brains), n = 5 (brain vascular malformations), n = 24 (brain tumours), n = 5 (AVM), n = 6 (LGG), n = 8 (GBM), n = 5 (MET) and n = 5 (MEN). e, The top ranking marker gene expression levels in different EC subtypes. For the colour scale, red shows high expression, white shows intermediate expression and blue shows low expression. Angio., angiogenic; prolif., proliferating. f, The overlap between human and mouse AV specification markers (of large artery, artery, arteriole, capillary, venule and large vein) and endothelial (EC) markers (top). Bottom, the percentage of common, human-specific and mouse-specific cell/AV specification markers. Astro, astrocytes; micro/macro, microglia/macrophages; neuro, neurons; PC, pericytes. g, Scatter plot showing the differential incoming and outgoing interaction strength of pathways in angiogenic capillaries, identifying signalling changes in those cells in pathological as compared to the control conditions. h, The number of statistically significant ligand–receptor interactions between EC subtypes in fetal versus adult/control brains (left) and pathological (path.) versus adult/control brains (right). The circle plots show a differential analysis of the intercellular signalling interactions; red indicates upregulation and blue indicates downregulation. i,j,k, The overall signalling patterns of different EC subtypes in fetal (i), adult/control (j) and pathological (k) brains. Grey bars indicate signalling strength.
