RNA-seq of young and senescent human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) under normal or high glucose conditions

Human endothelial cellular models are useful to disentangle the pathophysiological role of dysfunctional endothelium in the development of cardiovascular (CV) disease and organ damage in T2D. Here, we performed a RNAseq of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) undergoing replicative senescence and exposed to high glucose (25 mM) to investigate the combined effects of replicative senescence and high glucose on the transcriptional landscape of these cells. To gain insight into the molecular mechanisms driving the acquisition of a senescent phenotype following exposure to HG, we performed a RNA-seq assay on control (Ctr) and replicative senescent (Sen) HUVECs cultivated in presence/absence of HG culture medium (total number of samples = 12; number of samples in each cell type-medium condition group = 3) using the NovaSeq 6000 Illumina system. Differential expression analysis was performed in R environment (version 4.2.2) using the limma and edgeR Bioconductor R packages.