Fig. 8

Subtypes of testicular mast cells in the spermatogenic dysfunctional testis. A UMAP plots of mast cells in the disease group. Cells were colored by subclusters. B Validation of mast cell markers and markers of other types of immune cells among subcluster 0–2. C IHC staining of mast cell markers including TPSAB1, TPSB2, FCER1A and CPA3 in the testis. Arrows represented positive cells. The original images of IHC stained sections were obtained from Human Protein Atlas database (https://www.proteinatlas.org). D UMAP plots with trajectory lineage of testicular mast cells (up) and pseudotime analysis of mast cell cluster 0–2 using slingshot (down). E Violin plots showing the expression pattern of CD34, CD69 and CD44 in three mast cell subclusters. F, G and H IHC staining showing different distribution of mast cells. Triangles represented interstitial mast cells (located in testicular interstitium). Arrows represented peritubular mast cells (surrounding or presented in tubular walls). Diamond represented (extremely rare) mast cells breaking through basal lamina. * represented lumens of seminiferous tubules. Note that due to the existence of few mast cells in normal samples, we only do re-cluster of mast cells in disease samples of scRNA-seq set