Fig. 3

Sub-classification of fibroblast cells identified sub-cell types. a Five sub-cell types of heart fibroblast cells were identified by unsupervised clustering. Most female cells formed cluster 0 and 1 while most male cells formed cluster 2 and 3. b Distribution of male/female cells in each cluster. Cluster 0, 1, 2, and 3 exhibited dominance of one sex, while cluster 4 was a mixture of both sexes. c Expression of top ten marker genes distinguishing each cluster from the other clusters indicated strong sub-cell type specificity. Nonetheless, expression patterns were perceptually more similar between cluster 0 and 2 as well as those between cluster 1 and 3, than other pairs of clusters. Cluster 4 stood out as almost all corresponding marker genes were hardly expressed in other four clusters. d Top 20 marker genes distinguishing cluster 0 from 1 (left) and cluster 2 from 3 (right) showed a strong overlap. Twelve marker genes were conserved in top 20 most significant marker genes for both pairs of comparisons