Fig. 2

Fig. 2 Vascular and astrocytic snRNAseq analyses reveal unique vascular clusters of which pericytes are the most perturbed in AD brains.

a Three vascular and three astrocytic clusters were demonstrated in UMAP plots. b We identified three distinct vascular clusters which could be classified as pericytes (cl.25), endothelia (cl.26) and perivascular fibroblasts (cl.30), owing to the unique expression profiles of their highly expressed signature genes. Unlike the vascular clusters, the astrocytic clusters were less distinct from each other. c The constellation plot displays the relatedness of the 3 vascular and 3 astrocyte (see Fig. 3) clusters, based on post-hoc classification of cells. The thickness of the connecting line between any two clusters was determined by the percent of cells that are ambiguously assigned. Astrocyte clusters demonstrated greater relatedness as shown by the thick connecting lines (~1-10%). Vascular clusters, on the other hand, demonstrated more distinct cell populations with thin connecting lines (~0-1%). d Top Enriched GO terms of signature genes in each vascular cluster show distinct functions. *: enrichment FDR < 0.05. **: enrichment FDR < 0.001. e We also identified DEGs in these vascular clusters; the largest numbers of which were in the pericyte cl.25 (1562 up, 64 down), followed by endothelial cl.26 (34 up, 10 down) and perivascular fibroblasts cl.30 (8 up, 6 down). Pericyte cluster showed the highest number of DEGs in AD further implicating these cells. f Top GO Term Enrichment analysis was summarized for pericyte cluster cl.25, which shows pathways involved in cell-to-cell communication are upregulated. The full name of the fifth GO term from the top is, “NEGATIVE REGULATION OF TRANSMEMBRANE RECEPTOR PROTEIN SERINE THREONINE KINASE SIGNALING”. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Figure 2/panels c and e Created with BioRender.com released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.