Transcriptomic heterogeneity of endothelial cells during devleopmental angiogenesis

Efficient angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels from pre-existing vessels, underlie tissue growth during development. Blood vessels in the mouse ear has been shown to dramatically expand at the neonatal stage to meet the needs of postnatal tissue growth. Yet, it is not clear at the transcriptome level how endothelial cells lining the innermost layer of blood vessels drive angiogenesis at this developmental stage. The highly heterogeneous endothelial cell types during angiogenesis render traditional bulk RNA-sequencing unsuitable. Therefore, we utilized single-cell RNA- and CITE-seq to profile transcriptomic heterogeneity of both blood and lymphatic endothelial cells during developmental angiogenesis in mouse ear. CD31+, Cdh5CreERT2-Rtom+ cells were isolated from neonatal (P8) mouse ears. 10x genomics single-cell RNAseq together with CITE-seq was performed in duplicate to obtain single-cell transcriptome data and measurement of expression levels of 5 specific proteins.