Ligand-receptor interactions, biological processes, and pathways active during the cross talk between the cluster cells and the aortic microenvironment. (A) Distribution of the ligands and their corresponding receptors in the aortic microenvironment and clusters based on the microenvironment data set (common to at least 2 species, supplemental Table 9), the chicken cluster data set (supplemental Table 10), and a mouse cluster data set.³⁵  (B) Secretomics analysis using the microenvironment data set (common to at least 2 species) and the chicken/mouse cluster data sets. Of note, not all molecules are linked, because we used stringent active interaction sources (experiments and database) for better readability of the k-means clustering network. (B′) Enlarged view of the blue node shown in the box in panel B. (C-D) Ten first biological processes in GO terms (C) and most relevant KEGG pathways (D) enriched in the ligand-receptor data sets.