Fig. 2

Tumor-specific microenvironment shaped the malignant properties of tumor-associated MFAP5 + fibroblasts. A UMAP plot of scRNA-seq of fibroblasts in CRC. B Violin plot shows the cell markers of specific fibroblast subclusters. C Stacked bar plot of inferred cell proportions of fibroblast subpopulations in different tissues. D UMAP plots of fibroblast subclusters faceted by tissue types (include tumor core, border and adjacent normal tissues). E Violin plot suggests that the MFAP5 is a fibroblast-specific signature in CRC. F Pan-cancer analysis of MFAP5 expression between cancer and para-cancerous tissues visualized by TIMER tool. G Kaplan–Meier survival plot indicates that CRC patients with high level of MFAP5 have worse clinical outcome in GSE14333 cohort. H IHC analysis show the existence of MFAP5 + fibroblasts in tumor and normal tissues. I Quantification of MFAP5 staining intensity in the tumor and normal sites with H-score, paired-sample Wilcoxon test used for statistical analysis. J Box plot shows the correlation between H-score and TNM stage, Wilcoxon test applied to compare the differential expression of MFAP5 in different TNM stages, p < 0.05 as statistically significant