Vascular smooth muscle cell heterogeneity and plasticity in models of cardiovascular disease

Vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) accumulation is a hallmark of atherosclerosis and vascular injury. However, fundamental aspects of proliferation and the phenotypic changes within individual VSMCs, which underlie vascular disease remain unresolved. In particular, it is not known if all VSMCs proliferate and display plasticity, or whether individual cells can switch to multiple phenotypes. To assess whether proliferation and plasticity in disease is a general characteristic of VSMCs or a feature of a subset of cells, multi-colour lineage labelling is used to demonstrate that VSMCs in injury-induced neointimal lesions and in atherosclerotic plaques are oligo-clonal, derived from few expanding cells, within mice. Lineage tracing also revealed that the progeny of individual VSMCs contribute to both alpha Smooth muscle actin (aSma)-positive fibrous cap and Mac-3-expressing macrophage-like plaque core cells. Co-staining for phenotypic markers further identified a double-positive aSma+ Mac3+ cell population, which is specific to VSMC-derived plaque cells. In contrast, VSMC-derived cells generating the neointima after vascular injury generally retained expression of VSMC markers and upregulation of Mac3 was less pronounced. Monochromatic regions in atherosclerotic plaques and injury-induced neointima did not contain VSMC-derived cells expressing a different fluorescent reporter protein, suggesting that proliferation-independent VSMC migration does not make a major contribution to VSMC accumulation in vascular disease. Similarly, VSMC proliferation was examined in an Angiotensin II perfusion model of aortic aneurysm in mice, oligo-clonal proliferation was observed in remodelling regions of the vasculature, however phenotypic changes were observed in a large proportion of VSMCs, suggesting that the majority of VSMCs have some potential to modulate their phenotype. To understand the mechanisms behind the inherent VSMC heterogeneity and observed functionality, the single cell transcriptomic techniques Smart-seq2 and the Chromium 10X system were optimized for use on VSMCs. The work within this thesis suggests that extensive proliferation of a low proportion of highly plastic VSMCs results in the observed VSMC accumulation after injury, and the atherosclerotic and aortic aneurysm models of cardiovascular disease