Cell Fate Decision as High-Dimensional Critical State Transition
Fig 2
Critical transition during lineage commitment.
(A) Cell–cell correlation matrices displaying the Pearson correlation coefficient R(Sk, Sl) for all pairs of cells in states Sk and Sl (see S2 Appendix). R calculated for a set of 150 progenitor cells, 500 EPO-treated, 500 GM-CSF/IL-3-treated, and 450 combination-treated (COMB) cells from data used in Fig 1. Black squares (diagonal) emphasize the higher correlation between cells within the nominally same population. Two control genes (GAPDH and TBP) were excluded from this analysis. Lʹ, L, M, H, Hʹ indicate the Sca1 fractions shown in Fig 1: extremely low, low, medium, high, and extremely high level of Sca1 expression, respectively. (B) Average Pearson correlation coefficients for cell–cell pairs (left) and gene–gene pairs (center) as well as the state transition index Ic = 〈|R(gi, gj)|〉 / 〈R(Sk, Sl)〉 at various time points. Correlation coefficients were calculated for the central fractions/subpopulations in panel A(*). Error bars indicate SEM. (C) Gene–gene correlation matrices for the 17 genes of interest and the two endogenous control genes for the three treatments at various time points where correlation is indicated either by color (lower matrix triangle) or solid color segment in pie chart. Color values for magnitude of correlation coefficient for both matrices (A, C) are shown in color bar. Numerical data for the graphs in (B) and (C) can be found in S2 Data.