Identification of common endothelial intronic circular RNAs from different vascular beds

The study aimed to identify circular RNAs (circRNAs) commonly back-spliced to intronic region of different sets of endothelial cells (human cardiac microvascular endothelial cells (HCMEC), human aortic endothelial cells (HAoEC), human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs)) and to evaluate their overall expression and their expression compared to their respective host gene. Identified circRNAs were quality controlled by their detection in an additional exonuclease RNase R treated RNA-Seq dataset performed with RNA of HUVECs. CircRNAs were compared for overlapping detection between datasets and filtered by annotation for circRNAs back-spliced to intronic regions. Common endothelial intronic circRNAs candidates were compared to respective murine circRNAs stored in the circATLAS database. The prime candidate cZNF292 was functionally characterized in vivo and in vitro.