Fig. 5

Spatial interaction and intercellular communication networks of α-SMA⁺ CAFs in the ESCC invasive front. A Visualization of unsupervised neighborhood analysis for all cell-to-cell interactions in α-SMA⁺ CAFs_{(invasive front)} patient tissues based on the presence of significant neighboring (red) or avoidance (blue), and white represents cell interactions that are not present or not significant (permutation test, P < 0.01). B Agglomerative clustering of highlighted α-SMA⁺ CAFs (cell phenotype 7), the clustered heatmap revealed that they surrounded multiple cell phenotypes and avoided various immune cell types (such as B cells (phenotype 6), T cells (phenotype 10 and 16), FoxP3⁺ Tregs (phenotype 18), and granzyme B⁺ cells (phenotype 22)). The avoidances for each interaction cluster are listed below the dendrogram. The specific cell types are indicated by numbers displayed in the heatmap of Fig. 4B. Blue highlights the immune cell subtypes avoided with α-SMA⁺ CAFs. C Heatmap displaying all interactions in 5 ESCC invasive front tissues with α-SMA⁺ CAFs where the cell phenotype in the row was significantly neighbored (red) or avoided (blue) by the cell type in the column (permutation test, P < 0.01). D Interaction weight plot of CAFs. The thicker the line, the stronger the interaction weight/strength between the two cell types. E Difference of key interacting ligands in the outing and incoming signal mode between α-SMA⁺ CAFs and α-SMA⁻ CAFs, as analyzed by CellChat. F Communication probability of a signaling pathway shown in the heatmap. The likelihood of communication between the two cell subtypes increases with color intensity