Fig. 6

Cellular interaction network conducted using Cellchat. (a) Cell-cell communication among major cell types inferred using Cellchat. (b) Dotplot showing incoming and outgoing interaction strength of all cell types. (c) Principal component analysis showing functional clusters of all signaling pathways. (d) Relative information flow (Severe vs. Mild calcification) of all detected cell-cell communications. (e) A heatmap of outgoing signal strength from all cell types. ACTA2 + MDSC released strong ITGB2 signal. (f) Signaling patterns of ITGB2. ITGB2 signaling from ACTA2 + MDSC can exert strong influence on EGR1⁺VIC (activated VIC) and CCL2⁺VIC (Inflammatory VIC). (g) The relative contributions of different L-R (Ligand-Receptor) pairs of ITGB2 signaling pathway. (h) The orthographic view of z-stack scans of a calcific aortic valve section showing MRC1 and α-SMA co-expressing cells. (Scale bar: 20 μm) (i) The 3D view of a representative section. (j-k) Quantitative results of MRC1⁺cells (j) and α-SMA⁺MRC1⁺BMP2⁺cells (k). Numbers of certain cells were manually counted, areas of sections with tissue were measured using Image J