Dataset Information

Association of NOTCH3 with Elastic Fiber Dispersion in the Infrarenal Abdominal Aorta of Cynomolgus Monkeys

ABSTRACT: OBJECTIVE: The regional heterogeneity of vascular components and transcriptomes is an important determinant of aortic biology. This notion has been explored in multiple mouse studies. In the present study, we examined the regional heterogeneity of aortas in non-human primates. APPROACH AND RESULTS: Aortic samples were harvested from the ascending, descending, suprarenal, and infrarenal regions of young control monkeys and adult monkeys provided with high fructose for 3 years. The regional heterogeneity of aortic structure and transcriptomes was examined by histological and bulk RNA sequencing analyses. Immunostaining of CD31 and αSMA revealed that endothelial and smooth muscle cells were distributed homogeneously across the aortic regions. In contrast, elastic fibers were less abundant and dispersed in the infrarenal aorta compared to other regions and associated with collagen deposition. Bulk RNA sequencing identified a distinct transcriptome related to the Notch signaling pathway in the infrarenal aorta with significantly increased NOTCH3 mRNA compared to other regions. Immunostaining revealed that NOTCH3 protein was increased in the media of the infrarenal aorta. The abundance of medial NOTCH3 was positively correlated with the dispersion of elastic fibers. Adult cynomolgus monkeys provided with high fructose displayed vascular wall remodeling, such as smooth muscle cell loss and elastic fiber disruption, predominantly in the infrarenal region. The correlation between NOTCH3 and elastic fiber dispersion was enhanced in these monkeys. CONCLUSION: Aortas of young cynomolgus monkeys display regional heterogeneity of their transcriptome and the structure of elastin and collagens. Elastic fibers in the infrarenal aorta are dispersed along with upregulation of medial NOTCH3.

ORGANISM(S): Macaca fascicularis

PROVIDER: GSE227434 | GEO | 2023/03/22

REPOSITORIES: GEO

ACCESS DATA

Similar Datasets

Project description:Acute aortic dissection (AAD) is one of the major aortic diseases that occurs without a preceding symptom and often results in sudden death. Despite the recent advances in cardiovascular medicine, AAD remains a serious problem because its molecular pathogenesis is largely unknown. In this paper, we report our serendipitous discovery that stress-induced expression of tenascin C (TNC), a member of matricellular proteins, is the protection mechanism of aorta to prevent AAD. The aortic wall stress imposed by the aortic stiffening and the angiotensin II infusion caused the strong induction of TNC in wild type mouse aorta without gross morphological changes. While TNC knockout mice at the baseline showed no morphological, histological or biomechanical abnormalities of aorta, deletion of TNC gene rendered the aorta susceptible to AAD upon the aortic stress. The stressed TNC-null aorta showed the loss of the tensile strength due to the insufficient expression of extracellular matrix proteins and the exaggerated proinflammatory response before the onset of AAD. Therefore, TNC works as a stress-activated molecular damper both by reinforcing the tensile strength and by limiting the excessive proinflammatory response in aorta. Thus far, the molecular event that leads to the AAD development has been unclear because of the unpredictable nature of the AAD onset. This study sheds light on the previously unrecognized tissue protection mechanism that converts the potentially harmful stress response into the active reinforcement of the aorta, of which failure leads to the development of AAD. Although TNC is expressed in various tissues upon the mechanical and proinflammatory stimuli, its role has long been a mystery. Our data uncovered the adaptive role of TNC in aorta that must be resilient to the continuous hemodynamic and humoral stress for lifetime. We used periaortic application of 0.5 M CaCl2 to the infrarenal aorta or either wild type (WT) or tenascin C knockout (TNC-KO) mice to create the mouse model for stiffened aorta and infused the mice with AngII (1 µg/min/kg) for 1 week to apply the pathological stress on aorta (Ca+AngII). Mice were then killed with an overdose of pentobarbital to obtain the tissue samples. The suprarenal aortic samples, from the level of right renal artery to 10 mm above the right renal artery, and infrarenal aortic samples, from the level of left renal artery to 10 mm below the left renal artery, were collected and kept in RNAlater (Qiagen) until the extraction of total RNA using RNeasy (Qiagen). We obtained the RNA samples from 8 mice with Ca+AngII treatment and 5 mice without Ca+AngII treatment for each genotype. We pooled the RNA samples with the identical experimental condition to perform the transcriptome analysis using Mouse Genome 430 2.0 (Affymetrix). We obtained suprarenal aortic smooth muscle cells (ASMCs) from TNC-KO mice by enzymatic dispersion and cultured them in Dulbecco's modified Eagle medium (DMEM) supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum. We cultured TNC-KO ASMCs in the presence or absence of exogenous TNC (10 µg/mL) and stimulated the cells with 10 ng/mL TNF-alpha for 24 h before obtaining total RNA using RNeasy. We used 3 independent ASMC cultures without the exogenous TNC and 4 independent cultures with the exogenous TNC. We hybridized each of the RNA samples individually to Mouse Genome 430 2.0 Array (Affymetrix).

Dataset Information

Association of NOTCH3 with Elastic Fiber Dispersion in the Infrarenal Abdominal Aorta of Cynomolgus Monkeys

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure