Fig 1: Tumor cells within the invasive niche harbor epithelial collective migration features.a Unsupervised clustering of the tumor cell subpopulations represented as a UMAP plot. b Average expression level of the difference between the spatial TINF and spatial TNOD signature scores in tumor cell subpopulations of the scRNA-seq dataset, represented as a color scale overlaid on the UMAP plot. c UMAP illustrating the unsupervised clusters ranked according to their mean difference between the spatial TINF and spatial TNOD signature scores in tumor cell subpopulations of the scRNA-seq dataset. d Average expression level of the difference between the spatial TINF and spatial TNOD signature scores in tumor cell subpopulations of the scRNA-seq dataset, represented as violin plots per ranked cluster. e Average expression of the “basal” and “differentiation” signatures in tumor cell subpopulations of the scRNA-seq dataset, represented as a color scale overlaid on the UMAP plot (left panels) and as violin plots per ranked cluster (right panels). f Average expression level of the “collective migration” and “Hallmark of epithelial to mesenchymal transition” signatures in tumor cell subpopulations of the scRNA-seq dataset, represented as a color scale overlaid on the UMAP plot (left panels) and as violin plots per ranked cluster (right panels). g Pseudotemporal trajectory across tumor cell subpopulations, starting point in Low infiltrative cluster TC1 (upper panel). Expression of spatial TNOD (MPPED1, PTCH1) and spatial TINF (KRT6A, SFN) markers along the pseudotemporal trajectory of tumor cell subpopulations (lower panels). h Expression of basal (DST, COL17A1) markers along the pseudotemporal trajectory of tumor cell subpopulations. i Expression of differentiation (KRT1, CALML5), tight junction (CLDN4), adherens junction (NECTIN1), and desmosomal junction (DSG3) markers along the pseudotemporal trajectory of the tumor cell subpopulations. scRNA-seq single-cell RNA sequencing, huBCC human basal cell carcinoma, UMAP uniform manifold approximation and projection, TINF infiltrative tumor, TNOD nodular tumor, TC tumor cluster.