ggplot’s, element_text() comes with a color argument. Why does that matter? It doesn’t just accept atomics, you can hand it a vector! This effectively gives one access to conditional formatting. This works on ggplot2_3.3.0 but “vectorized input to element_text() is not officially supported” so YMMV with newer versions.
Here’s an example I think it makes an otherwise unbearable figure a little more so without requiring duplicated labels.
One thing to be aware of is the ordering of a character/ factor may differ between a data.frame and the plot. In the visualized example, I had mRNA as type character instead of factor so it got alphabetized when it was plotted rather than by the order appearing in the data.frame. .png)