Fig. 3: Concerted immune regulation at the single-cell level during pregnancy.

Left: pairs of cell types with substantially different (very large effect size, t > 0.622) relative numbers of top-k (k = 0.01%) correlations of individual cells between the third trimester (T3) and postpartum (PP) based on the cells’ functional characteristics. For cell type abbreviations, see Supplementary Table 3. The thickness of the connecting edges represent the corresponding effect size (Cliff’s δ) across samples. Only very large effect sizes are visualized (threshold t = 0.622). The blue and orange colors of the edges signifies a relative decrease or increase, respectively, in cell correlations from the third trimester to postpartum. The scatter plots along the circle show single cells from each cell type visualized using CorALS’s correlation-based t-SNE (innate, dark background; light cells, adaptive; light background, dark cells). Right: the accumulated top-k correlation shifts between the innate and adaptive immune cells, and B cells and CD56^dimCD16⁺ NK cells, respectively, shown by density plots for the number of top-k correlations across samples. Overall, this visualization illustrates the dynamically changing overlap of functional characteristics of B cells and CD56^dimCD16⁺ NK cells with the functional characteristics observed in the total pool of innate or adaptive immune-cell populations.