Fig. 1

Study principles and workflow. Data are from single-cell RNA-seq of peripheral blood monocyte cells in healthy participants from dataset 1. A-D present the distribution of zero values by individual genes and by single cells. A total of 21,42830 genes had zero values in at least one cell (A), and more than 95% of 15,973 cells showed zero values in at least one gene  (B). Among a set of 347 genes from 3 KEGG pathways, all genes had zero values in at least one cell (C), and 95% of 15,973 cells contained zero values in at least one gene (D). E-G show reductions of zero values in merged cells. The percentage of zero values of 21,430 genes was markedly reduced in merged cells. The zero-value reduction was approximately 50% among 50 merged cells (E). Similarly, zero values of the 347 genes were reduced in merged cells (F) and were consistently observed in 6 different cell sets (G)