Fig. 7

Cell‒cell communication reveals the pro-metastatic effect of CAFs. A The heatmap shows the number of potential ligand‒receptor pairs between cell populations predicted by CellChat. B Signalling pathways are clustered into 3 categories based on their function. C The bubble plot shows the ligand‒receptor pairs of CXCL and CCL. D The amount of communication, including sender, receiver, mediator and influencer, between each cell type in the CXCL signalling pathway. E Same as in D but for the CCL signalling pathway. F Predictive signalling factor regulatory network centred on CAFs. G Heatmap of cell abundance for each sample predicted based on bulk RNA-seq data by CIBERSORTx. Shown are Row z scores. H COX risk regression to assess the association between relative cell abundance and patient survival from bulk RNA-seq. I-J Kaplan‒Meier curves of patient survival in relation to CAFs and dendritic cells