Fig. 5

Cell–cell interactions between aged microglia and venous BECs. a Dot plot depicting the interaction of “leukocyte migration” between cells in the SVZ and BECs from different vascular segments. Node size represents count of interaction pairs and node color represents power of interaction pairs. b t-SNE projection of microglia in the SVZ from young and aged mice (left). Cell types were color-coded and annotated based on the transcriptomic profiles. Bar plot showing the fraction of cells associated with each cell type from both young and aged mice (right). c Sankey diagram depicting the interactions between microglia and venous BECs. The proportional flow represents the number of gene pairs. d Dot plot showing the gene pairs between venous BECs (old vs. young) and microglia. Gene pairs with p-value < 0.05 in permutation test are fetched. Dot color represents the power of gene pairs by multiplying the expression levels of participating genes. e Cell plot showing interaction pairs between microglia and vein. The vivid two-cell graph was generated by the InterCellDB package using default settings. f Left: Representative confocal microscopic images of young and old mice brains stained for TNF-α and IBA-1. Nuclei are labeled with DAPI. Scale bars: 20 μm. Right: Quantification of TNF-α fluorescence in IBA1⁺ cells in four young (6–8 weeks old) and four aged (18 months old) male mice. ***P = 0.0008, two-tailed Student’s t test. Data are shown as mean ± s.e.m. g CD8⁺ T cells in inserts were cocultured with young brain slice, aged brain slice, microglia-depleted aged brain slice and aged brain slice with anti-CCL3 for 24 h. Cells in the lower compartment were collected for flow cytometry analysis. Each dot represents one mice. *Adjusted-P = 0.0155(young brain slie vs aged brain slice), # Adjusted-P = 0.0161(aged brain slice vs aged brain slice + anti-CCL3), One-way ANOVA. Data are shown as mean ± s.e.m.