Study on intercellular communication and key genes of smooth muscle cells in human coronary atherosclerosis based on single cell sequencing technology

Objective·To use single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-Seq) technology to interpret the cellular communication landscape of coronary atherosclerosis (CA), and to explore the dominant cell subsets and their key genes.Methods·The GSE131778 data set was downloaded and preprocessed, and quality controlling, dimension reduction clustering and annotation were carried out. Then cell communication analysis was conducted by using CellChat package to identify dominant cell subsets. The FindAllMarker function was used to screen differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between the dominant cell subpopulation and other cell subpopulations, and its protein-protein interaction (PPI) network was constructed. The DEGs ranked in the top five of the Degree algorithm were taken as key genes. Then, the key genes were matched and mined with the cell communication network analyzed by CellChat to obtain the ligand-receptor pairs (L-R) and the signal pathways mediated by the key genes, and the results were visualized. At the same time, the