Fig. 8

LPS-Induced metabolic and homeostatic dysregulation in neonatal microglia. (A) Heatmap illustrating changes in microglia-related gene expression following LPS treatment. (B) Bar graph showing the number of DEGs in each LPS dosage group compared to NS, accompanied by a Venn diagram indicating the overlap of DEGs across the groups. A total of 724 common DEGs were used for GO term enrichment analysis, with the bar plot displaying the results and x-axis representing -log10(p.adjust). (C) WGCNA module-condition relationship heatmap, highlighting the brown and blue modules as being strongly correlated with LPS treatment. (D) Venn diagram showing the overlap of the 724 common DEGs with the brown and blue modules, followed by a dot plot of enriched biological processes and pathways. (E) Scatter plot illustrating gene significance (GS) and module membership (MM) in the blue module for the 10 mg/kg LPS group, highlighting key metabolic genes. (F) Bar graphs showing Pgk1 and Pgam1 expression across treatment groups. Kruskal–Wallis test followed by Dunn’s post hoc test: Pgk1: H = 19.978, p = 0.0002; Pgam1: H = 20.65, p = 0.0010 (n = 7–8/group, *P < 0.05, ***P < 0.001, NS vs. LPS). (G) Representative immunofluorescence images of Iba-1 (green) and Pgk1 (red) in in P3 mouse brains treated with NS or LPS (5 mg/kg). Scale bar = 100 μm. (H) Quantification of Iba-1⁺Pgk1⁺ cell density (cells/mm², left) and the percentage of Pgk1⁺Iba-1⁺ cells among total Iba-1⁺ cells (right). Welch’s t-test (left, t = 9.29, p < 0.001) and unpaired t-test (right, t = 8.08, p < 0.001). (n = 7–10/group, ***p < 0.001). (I) A simplified metabolic pathway schematic is displayed on the right (created using BioRender).J. Heatmap showing the predicted metabolic flux profile for energy-related modules, generated using scFEA. Each row represents the flux of a specific metabolic module across different cell groups (x-axis), with the color scale bar indicating the magnitude and direction of flux