Fig. 5.

Single-cell analysis reveals a positive correlation between HIF1α and PD-L1 expression in melanoma subpopulations with high HIF1α levels, or in tumors with elevated PD-L1 levels. (A) T-stochastic neighbor embedding plot (t-SNE, perplexity = 50) using single-cell RNAseq analysis of 7186 cells from 33 melanoma tumors [19]. CAF (cancer-associated fibroblasts), endo (endothelial cells), mal (malignant cells), nk (natural killer cells). (B) XY-plots showing the correlation (R) between PD-L1 (CD274) and HIF1α or STAT1 mRNA expression (log2 transformed) in the subset of 2018 melanoma cells. (C) HIF1α expression in the t-SNE plot from (A). Melanoma subpopulations with low (HIF1α Low), or high (HIF1α High) HIF1α expression. (D) Graphs show HIF1α, BNIP3L and PD-L1 expression in the HIF1α low and high melanoma cell subpopulations. (E) PD-L1 expression in the t-SNE plot from (A). (F) Graph depicting PD-L1 expression in all 33 melanoma samples. (G) XY-plots showing the correlation (R) between PD-L1 (CD274) and HIF1α or STAT1 mRNA expression in tumor 110 (258 cells) (H) YY-plot showing HIF1α (black squares) and PD-L1 (red dots) in tumor 110. Cells were ordered by CD274. (I) Bar graph showing PD-L1 (CD274) expression in the different cell types. (J) XY-plots showing the correlation (R) between PD-L1 (CD274) and HIF1α or STAT1 mRNA expression in macrophages (420 cells) from all tumors