Defining cellular diversity at the swine maternal–fetal interface using spatial transcriptomics and organoids
Fig 3
Spatial transcriptomics resolves global expression at the porcine maternal–fetal interface.
A) Schematic of spatial transcriptomics workflow of gestational day 66 (GD66) maternal–fetal interfaces (n = 4; 2 male and 2 female). Created in BioRender. Mccutcheon, C. (2025) https://BioRender.com/hus6ktj B) UMAP showing 10 distinct populations obtained via spatial transcriptomics. C) Dot-plot of top markers for each cluster obtained via spatial transcriptomics. Color of dots denotes average expression, whereas size represents percentage of cells in a cluster expressing the gene of interest. D) H&E staining of individual porcine maternal–fetal interface sections (top). Spatial Dim-Plot showing the histologic localization of UMAP cluster populations (bottom). Each image represents a separate maternal–fetal interface. E) Spatial Dim-Plot showing separation of maternal and fetal compartments. Representative maternal–fetal Interface shown. F) Spatial Dim-Plot showing the histologic localization of UMAP individual cluster populations. Representative maternal–fetal Interface shown (MFI094). G) Stacked bar-plot showing the relative proportion of each cluster across individual maternal–fetal interfaces. H) Spatial Dim-Plot (Left panels) and Spatial Feature plots (Right panels) showing the localization of areola-1 and areola-2 structures (Left panels) and the expression of CTSL (right panels) within representative maternal–fetal interfaces. The underlying data for this figure can be found at the Gene Expression Omnibus via accession numbers GSM8980980, GSM8980981, GSM8980982, and GSM8980983.