Chinese scholars "one picture locked" primate arterial vascular aging genes
Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, May 6 (Reporter Zhang Jiaxing) It is difficult for aging blood vessels to provide sufficient nutrients to the whole body, which will directly lead to the decline of human organ function. For the first time, Chinese scholars drew a single-cell atlas of primate arterial vascular senescence, and the results were published online in Nature News on the 5th.
The Qu Jing research group, Liu Guanghui research group of the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Tang Fuchen research group of Peking University joined forces to first analyze the arteries of young and old cynomolgus monkeys. Techniques such as three-dimensional reconstruction of large-scale electron microscopy revealed that aged blood vessels present a series of aging features such as thickened blood vessel walls, calcification, fibrosis, and vascular endothelial cell loss.
"At present, there is no clear cell composition and molecular characteristics of human elderly blood vessels. Vascular wall cells from different sources are highly heterogeneous, which means that the blood vessel cell composition of the heart and fingers are different." One of the corresponding authors of the paper, Animal of Chinese Academy of Sciences Researcher Qu Jing introduced.
The aortic arch and coronary arteries are susceptible parts of human atherosclerosis, so the researchers used high-precision single-cell transcriptome sequencing technology to map the gene expression of vascular cell types such as endothelial cells, smooth muscle cells and fibroblasts of the aortic arch and coronary arteries Atlas, and identified eight new molecular markers to distinguish aorta and coronary arteries.
Further analysis shows that the transcription factor FOXO3A (protein product encoded by the longevity gene FOXO3A) is a key molecular node that regulates differentially expressed genes in aging blood vessels. The expression of FOXO3A is down-regulated in 6 kinds of aging vascular wall cells, which is an important feature of primate arterial senescence.
"We combined embryonic stem cell gene editing and directed induction differentiation technology to obtain human vascular endothelial cells targeted to knockout the FOXO3A gene." Zhang Weiqi, the first author of the article, said that compared with wild-type cells, FOXO3A-deficient vascular endothelial cells showed The degradation of proliferation, migration, and tube formation capabilities appears "older."