Fig. 3

SMYD3 is overexpressed in malignant epithelial cells and correlates with cell stemness in OSCC. A UMAP dimensionality reduction was used to show the distribution and dissimilarity of cell types in GSE103322. B, C SMYD3 is highly expressed in malignant cells. D, E A pseudotime trajectory was plotted to describe the evolution of epithelial cells, and the progression trajectory originated from normal epithelial cells and developed into two main branches. F Epithelial cells including normal and malignant cells were segmented into five clusters defined as C1–C5. G, H In the (dynamic) expression profile of SMYD3 in epithelial cells pseudotime, SMYD3 became highly expressed in C5 group. I, J Violin plots showed the level of “stem cell proliferation” and “positive regulation of stem cell population maintenance” in C1–C5 of epithelial cells. K In malignant cells from single-cell RNA-seq dataset (GSE103322), SMYD3 expression was positively correlated with cell stemness score measured by GSVA. L SMYD3 expression was positively correlated with cell stemness as well as proliferation score measured by ssGSEA in meta-GEO dataset. M The GSEA results of RNA-seq on CAL-27 transfected with NC and SMYD3 siRNA groups