Research Paper Volume 14, Issue 17 pp 6957—6974

Figure 4. Soft substrates inhibited contractility of hFFs. (A) GSEA for vascular smooth muscle contraction of mRNAs in soft/TCP. Enrichment score of vascular smooth muscle contraction genes against their expression profile of soft/TCP. The x axis was the level, and the y axis was the enrichment score of these genes (left). Heat map showed the distribution of mRNAs expression of soft/TCP enriched under the vascular smooth muscle contraction KEGG entry in all samples under the gene set, with each row representing one sample. Each line represented a gene, the color from blue to red represented mRNA expression from low to high (right). (B) Quantitative reverse transcription PCR (qRT-PCR) analysis comparing α-SMA expression levels in soft and TCP. ^***P < 0.001 (mean, n = 3). (C) Immunostaining against PERIOSTIN and the positive rate on day 1. Scale bars: 50 μm. ^***P < 0.001 (mean, n = 3 randomly selected fields from triplicate samples).