Fig. 1: Region-specific vSMC transcriptomics.
From: Region-specific gene expression and sex inform about disease susceptibility in the aorta
a, Experimental design. Twelve-week-old C57BL/6J mice (n = 8; four males and four females) were sacrificed, and the aorta and carotid arteries were dissected based on anatomical landmarks and digested into four single-cell preparations per sex for generation of eight scRNA-seq libraries. b, Representative mouse aorta used in single-cell preparations with brackets indicating the four anatomic sites used for scRNA-seq. c, UMAP of the cell types identified in the eight libraries combined. EC, endothelial cell. d, UMAP of vSMCs from the four anatomic locations. e, Circular packing diagram showing the relative contribution of site-enriched vSMC signature genes to the total vSMC transcriptome. f, Heatmap expression of classical vSMC cell type markers relative to regional signature genes (top five) and their related gene ontology categories. Markers in red indicate transcripts validated by immunohistochemistry (shown later). Abd, abdominal; Wisp1, Ccn4 (gene symbol). g, Dot plot visualization of the expression of the four HOX clusters in vSMCs by anatomic location. Panel a created using BioRender.com.
