Fig. 4. Visualization and analysis of intercellular communication networks for mouse primary visual cortex.

a Visualizations of the inferred communication networks among multiple cell types of VISp. Circle plot, chord diagram and heatmap are used to visualize the intercellular communication networks aggregated by method “weight”. In the circle plot, the node size indicates the strength of the outgoing signal from the cell, and the text labels are labeled by different colors to indicate their cell classes (i.e., glutamatergic, GABAergic and non-neuronal); the communication strength for each link is indicated by the width. In the chord diagram, sectors for different cell classes are repelled by larger gaps; the width of each link represents the communication strength, while the width of a sector (representing a cell group) reflects the strength of the total communications from or to this cell group. The color bar in the heatmap indicates the communication strength. b The outgoing signaling patterns of senders and incoming signaling patterns of receivers visualized by alluvial plots, which show the correspondence between the inferred latent patterns and cell groups, and the correspondence between the inferred latent patterns and interaction pairs. The thickness of the flow indicates the contribution of the cell group or interaction pair to each latent pattern. The height of each pattern is proportional to the number of its associated cell groups or interaction pairs. The top 60 interaction pairs with the highest information flow are used for analysis. c Projecting interactions onto a two-dimensional manifold according to their functional similarity. Each interaction pair is represented by a dot, whose color and size indicate the functional group and the total communication strength (normalized by the maximum), respectively. d Magnified view of the two-dimensional manifold for each interaction group.