Fig. 2

Identification of featured cell types and genes related to NAFLD-HCC microenvironment by transcriptome data

A) Four cell types with significantly different infiltration scores including pDC, Treg, CD4⁺ Tcm, and the endothelial cell among NAFLD-T, NAFLD-L, HBV-T and HBV-L groups calculated by TIMER2.0.

B) Venn diagram for genes screened by four strategies. G1: 1968 DEGs comparing NAFLD-T and NAFLD-L. G2: 214 genes from G1, whose expression were associated with the cell infiltration scores of four NAFLD-HCC microenvironmental cell types mentioned in Fig. 2A (|r|>0.5, p < 0.05, spearman correlation). G3:1564 DEGs comparing the NAFLD-T and HBV-T. G4: 983 NAFLD-HCC related genes based on previous literatures by text mining

C) Correlation among 32 candidate genes (G2 + G3) and the infiltration level of four microenvironmental cells in NAFLD-T.

D) Volcano plot for gene expression by RNA-Seq. 32 candidate genes (G2 + G3) associated with the infiltration level of four microenvironmental cells in NAFLD-T were colored.

CD4⁺ Tcm: CD4⁺ central memory T cell, Treg: regulatory T cell, pDC: plasmacytoid dendritic cell, DEGs: differential expressed genes