The two main blood flow patterns, namely, pulsatile shear (PS) prevalent in straight segments of arteries and oscillatory shear (OS) observed at branch points, are associated with atheroprotective (healthy) and atheroprone (unhealthy) vascular phenotypes, respectively. The effects of blood flow-induced shear stress on endothelial cells (ECs) and vascular health have generally been studied using human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). While there are a few studies comparing the differential roles of PS and OS across different types of ECs at a single time point, there is a paucity of studies comparing the temporal responses between different EC types. In the current study, we measured OS and PS transcriptomic responses in human aortic endothelial cells (HAECs) over 24 h and compared these temporal responses of HAECs with our previous findings on HUVECs. The measurements were made at 1, 4, and 24 h in order to capture the responses at early, mid, and late time points after shearing. The results indicate that the responses of HAECs and HUVECs are qualitatively similar for endothelial function-relevant genes and several important pathways with a few exceptions, thus demonstrating that HUVECs can be used as a model to investigate the effects of shear on arterial ECs, with consideration of the differences. Our findings show that HAECs exhibit an earlier response or faster kinetics as compared to HUVECs. The comparative analysis of HAECs and HUVECs presented here offers insights into the mechanisms of common and disparate shear stress responses across these two major endothelial cell types.

两种主要的血流模式，即在动脉直段中普遍存在的脉动剪切（PS）和在分支点观察到的振荡剪切（OS），分别与动脉粥样硬化保护性（健康）和动脉粥样硬化易发性（不健康）血管表型相关。通常使用人脐静脉内皮细胞 (HUVEC) 研究血流引起的剪切应力对内皮细胞 (EC) 和血管健康的影响。虽然有一些研究比较了不同类型 EC 在单个时间点的 PS 和 OS 的不同作用，但比较不同 EC 类型之间的时间响应的研究却很少。在当前的研究中，我们测量了人主动脉内皮细胞 (HAEC) 24 小时内的 OS 和 PS 转录组反应，并将 HAEC 的这些时间反应与我们之前对 HUVEC 的研究结果进行了比较。在 1、4 和 24 小时进行测量，以捕获剪切后早期、中期和晚期时间点的响应。结果表明，除了少数例外，HAEC 和 HUVEC 对内皮功能相关基因和几个重要通路的反应在质量上相似，因此证明 HUVEC 可以用作研究剪切力对动脉 EC 影响的模型，同时考虑到的差异。我们的研究结果表明，与 HUVEC 相比，HAEC 表现出更早的响应或更快的动力学。这里介绍的 HAEC 和 HUVEC 的比较分析提供了对这两种主要内皮细胞类型的常见和不同剪切应力反应机制的见解。