Fig. 3

Identification of senescent mesenchymal cells in oral lichen planus (OLP). (a) UMAP plot of mesenchymal cells from control, EOLP, and NEOLP patients colored according to PDGFRA expression. (b) UMAP plot of mesenchymal cells from control, EOLP, and NEOLP patients., colored by cluster. (c) Heatmap of the ssGSEA enrichment scores for seven senescence-related gene sets. Higher ssGSEA enrichment scores are depicted in red, and genes with lower expression are depicted in blue. (d) Violin plot of mean ssGSEA enrichment scores for seven senescence-related gene sets in each cell cluster and disease. (e) UMAP plot of mesenchymal cells from EOLP and NEOLP patients colored by senescent cluster and feature plot of NFKB1 and NFKB2. Quantification of the gene expression of NFKB1 and NFKB2 in each cluster. (f) Representative images of immunohistochemical staining for p21, PDGFRα, and CD45 in the subepithelial layer of oral mucosa sections from OLP and control groups. (g) Quantification of p21 + PDGFRα + cells in the subepithelial layer. Data are presented as mean and standard error (SE) with dot plots. The circular dot plots represent females, and the triangles represent males. P-values were determined using “FindMarkers” function of Seurat for single-cell RNA-seq data and two-tailed Student’s t-test for immunohistochemical staining

UMAP, uniform manifold approximation and projection; EOLP, erosive oral lichen planus; NEOLP, non-erosive oral lichen planus; ssGSEA, single-sample gene set enrichment analysis