Fig. 5. Ligand-receptor analysis predicts TIME-wide and exhaustion-specific cellular crosstalk.
a Social graph depicting the number of interactions between the five most frequent cell types. b Enrichment of selected ligand-receptor interactions in either IE1 or IE2 tumors for the given cell type pairs. Selections were made based on literature evidence and biological interpretability. The full list of enriched interaction pairs is in Supplementary Data 6. White squares denote interactions with an enrichment p value >0.05 or a mean LR score <0.4 in the given cell type pair. Two-sided Wilcoxon rank sum test was used for statistical analysis. c DotPlot (top) and heatmap (bottom) depicting the number of interactions between different myeloid and T and NK cell metaclusters. M indicates myeloid metacluster; T indicates T and NK cell metacluster. d Heatmap showing the myeloid-derived ligands with the highest ability to affect exhaustion-related target gene expression as predicted by NicheNet.