Fig. 4

Identification of endothelial cell and smooth muscle cell subclusters in the human tendon. A t-SNE visualization of the subclusters of endothelial cells and smooth muscle cells. B Summarized subpopulations of endothelial cell percentage changes. C The proportion of each subcluster of smooth muscle cells in the lesioned and normal tendons. D Heatmap showing the results of enrichment analysis of 50 hallmarker gene sets in EC1-5. E Volcano plots displaying the DEGs in EC1 between the normal group and the diseased group. Each dot represented one gene. Red dots, differentially upregulated genes; blue dots, differentially downregulated genes; gray dots, non-differentially expressed genes. F GO enrichment analysis of DEGs between normal EC1 and diseased EC1. G–L Violin plots showing representative marker genes associated with different types of SMC expressed in SMC1 and SMC2