Fig. 2

TBI causes long-term alterations in femur bone marrow stem/progenitor cells. The transcriptomic profile of femur bone marrow lineage-c-Kit + Sca1+ (LSK+) cells at 90 days post-injury (dpi) was assessed using the NanoString nCounter Stem Cell panel. (A) Principal component analysis (PCA) plot indicated that the two main principal components of variation were captured on the x- and y-axis, respectively, showing a clear separation of clusters between the Sham and TBI groups. (B) Pathway enrichment analysis with the MSigDB Hallmark 2020 database revealed that several gene networks related to hematopoietic stem cell proliferation and self-renewal, inflammatory activation, and senescence-associated were enriched after chronic TBI. (C) Heatmap of genes that are uniquely altered in the most differentially expressed genes between Sham and 90 dpi. Color coding was based on z-score scaling. (D-G) Volcano plot analyses for the Apoptosis (D), Senescence and Quiescence (E), Oxidative Stress Response (F), and Epigenetic Modification (G) pathways showed the most differentially and significantly expressed genes within each network. n = 4–5 mice/group