Figure 10.

The DAC is a critical regulator of THBS signaling in AF. A,C) Circle plot showing direction (A) and heat map (C) showing role importance in the four CellChat‐defined centrality measures in the THBS signaling pathway in all clusters in AF. B) Genes involved in THBS signaling network and their relative expression levels in each AF cluster. D) Overall outgoing and incoming signal strength of each cluster in the THBS signaling network visualized in a scatter plot. E) Significance of each ligand‐receptor (L‐R) signaling interaction comprising “THBS” signaling network in AF. The DAC was set as the source of the signal. F) qPCR showing COMP, THBS1 and CD47 mRNA abundance in whole healthy (grade II, n = 4) versus diseased (grade III‐IV, n = 7) AF. Data are relative to GAPDH. Two‐tailed unpaired Student's t‐test were used to establish statistical significance. Data are expressed as means ±SD (standard deviation). *p <0.05. G) IHC for THBS1 and staining was performed on healthy (grade II, n = 4) and diseased (grade III‐IV, n = 6) AF tissues. Counterstaining was performed using methyl green to calculate percentages of positive cells verses total cell numbers. Red arrows indicate examples for positive cells and blue arrows show negative cells. Scale bars indicate 200 µm.