Deep transcriptomic analysis of human vascular cells identifies novel risk genes for common vascular diseases

Several genome-wide association studies have to date been carried out to identify genetic risk loci associated with vascular diseases. Many of the established common variants likely perturb the expression of disease-relevant genes within the vascular tissue itself. To identify such genes on a genome-wide level, we analyzed the transcriptome of human coronary artery smooth muscle and endothelial cells for Allele-Specific Expression (ASE). Overall design: observation of mRNA expression in 2 different cell types from paired donor samples