Endothelial cell type-specific molecular requirements for angiogenesis drive fenestrated vessel development in the brain
- Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic, United States
Abstract
Vascular endothelial cells (vECs) in the brain exhibit structural and functional heterogeneity. Fenestrated, permeable brain vasculature mediates neuroendocrine function, body-fluid regulation, and neural immune responses, however its vascular formation remains poorly understood. Here we show that specific combinations of vascular endothelial growth factors (Vegfs) are required to selectively drive fenestrated vessel formation in the zebrafish myelencephalic choroid plexus (mCP). We found that the combined, but not individual, loss of Vegfab, Vegfc, and Vegfd causes severely impaired mCP vascularization with little effect on neighboring non-fenestrated brain vessel formation, demonstrating fenestrated-vEC-specific angiogenic requirements. This Vegfs-mediated vessel-selective patterning also involves Ccbe1. Expression analyses, cell-type-specific ablation, and paracrine activity-deficient vegfc mutant characterization reveal that vEC-autonomous Vegfc and meningeal fibroblast-derived Vegfab and Vegfd are critical for mCP vascularization. These results define molecular cues and cell types essential for directing fenestrated CP vascularization and indicate that vECs' distinct molecular requirements for angiogenesis underlie brain vessel heterogeneity.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Source data files have been provided for Figures 1 and 4.
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Funding
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01 NS117510)
- Ryota L Matsuoka
Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic
- Ryota L Matsuoka
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All zebrafish work was approved by the Cleveland Clinic's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee under the protocol number 2018-1970. Every effort was made to minimize suffering and distress of the animals used throughout this study.
Copyright
© 2021, Parab et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Endothelial cell type-specific molecular requirements for angiogenesis drive fenestrated vessel development in the brain
eLife 10:e64295.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64295
