RNA preparation and RNA sequencing
After 48 hours of test compound exposure under atheroprone conditions, RNA was separately harvested from ECs and SMCs using the Invitrogen Purelink RNA Mini kit (12183018A) and RNA concentration determined with the Nanodrop according to manufacturer’s instructions. 250 ng RNA per sample was submitted to Expression Analysis, Inc. for Illumina-based RNA deep sequencing and approximately 20 million, 50 base pair, paired-end reads were generated per sample. For each treatment, 4 EC and 4 SMC samples were run per experiment.