{"doi":"10.1172/jci.insight.153769","title":"Distinct patterns of responses in endothelial cells and smooth muscle cells following vascular injury","abstract":"Vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs) are heterogeneous, and their differential responses to vascular injury are not well understood. To address this question, we performed single-cell analysis of vascular cells to a ligation injury in mouse carotid arteries after 3 days. While endothelial cells had a homogeneous activation of mesenchymal genes, less than 30% of SMCs responded to the injury and generated 2 distinct clusters - i.e., proinflammatory SMCs and stress-responsive SMCs. Proinflammatory SMCs were enriched with high levels of inflammatory markers such as vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 while stress-responsive SMCs overexpressed heat shock proteins. Trajectory analysis suggested that proinflammatory SMCs were potentially derived from a specific subpopulation of SMCs. Ligand-receptor pair analysis showed that the interaction between macrophages and proinflammatory SMCs was the major cell-cell communication among all cell types in the injured arteries. In vitro coculture demonstrated that VCAM1+ SMCs had a stronger chemotactic effect on macrophage recruitment than VCAM1- SMCs. Consistently, the number of VCAM1+ SMCs significantly increased in injured arteries and atherosclerotic lesions of ApoE-/- mice and human arteries. These findings provide insights at the single-cell level on the distinct patterns of endothelial cells and SMC responses to vascular injury.","journal":"JCI Insight","year":2022,"id":245730,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":18,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9557,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":751573,"name":"Qin An","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":236093,"name":"Weikang Zhao","orcid":"0000-0002-5594-213X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":202138,"name":"Yang Song","orcid":"0000-0001-7716-9216","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":880876,"name":"Xiaokai Tang","orcid":"0000-0002-6079-8275","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":289608,"name":"Jing Wang","orcid":"0000-0002-7120-0857","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":386357,"name":"Chih‐Chiang Chang","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":880877,"name":"Gexin Zhao","orcid":"0000-0003-2278-3432","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":385049,"name":"Tzung K. Hsiai","orcid":"0000-0003-1734-0792","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":750841,"name":"Guoping Fan","orcid":"0000-0001-5235-6410","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":642121,"name":"Yubo Fan","orcid":"0000-0002-3480-4395","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":267119,"name":"Song Li","orcid":"0000-0002-4760-8828","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":385044,"name":"Xili Ding","orcid":"0000-0002-8076-6289","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":69,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:23:39.284121Z","pmid":"36278486","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}