{"doi":"10.2337/db19-0471","title":"Pericyte Bridges in Homeostasis and Hyperglycemia","abstract":"Diabetic retinopathy is a potentially blinding eye disease that threatens the vision of one-ninth of patients with diabetes. Progression of the disease has long been attributed to an initial dropout of pericytes that enwrap the retinal microvasculature. Revealed through retinal vascular digests, a subsequent increase in basement membrane bridges was also observed. Using cell-specific markers, we demonstrate that pericytes rather than endothelial cells colocalize with these bridges. We show that the density of bridges transiently increases with elevation of Ang-2, PDGF-BB, and blood glucose; is rapidly reversed on a timescale of days; and is often associated with a pericyte cell body located off vessel. Cell-specific knockout of KLF4 in pericytes fully replicates this phenotype. In vivo imaging of limbal vessels demonstrates pericyte migration off vessel, with rapid pericyte filopodial-like process formation between adjacent vessels. Accounting for off-vessel and on-vessel pericytes, we observed no pericyte loss relative to nondiabetic control retina. These findings reveal the possibility that pericyte perturbations in location and process formation may play a role in the development of pathological vascular remodeling in diabetic retinopathy.","journal":"Diabetes","year":2020,"id":66599,"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":50,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.955,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":354654,"name":"H. Clifton Ray","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":353051,"name":"Richard W. Doty","orcid":"0000-0003-4197-4920","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":354655,"name":"Corbin Mathews","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":318539,"name":"Natasha Sheybani","orcid":"0000-0002-1137-058X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":354656,"name":"Kathleen Fitzgerald","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":353052,"name":"Remi Prince","orcid":"0000-0002-8866-3356","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":353053,"name":"Molly R. Kelly‐Goss","orcid":"0000-0002-0691-0107","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":353054,"name":"Walter L. Murfee","orcid":"0000-0002-8247-4722","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":302893,"name":"John C. Chappell","orcid":"0000-0002-0427-5170","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":353055,"name":"Gary K. Owens","orcid":"0000-0002-7119-9657","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":236169,"name":"Paul Yates","orcid":"0000-0001-9317-0145","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":339143,"name":"Shayn M. Peirce","orcid":"0000-0001-5857-5606","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1670,"name":"Bruce A. Corliss","orcid":"0000-0003-2962-7344","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":54,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:14:50.590588Z","pmid":"32321760","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":[]}