Effect of the upper airway obstruction on arterial remodeling in rats: A mechanobiology study

Vascular remodeling is related to time-varying mechanical stress. In this report, arterial pressures (APs) in six Sprague Dawley (SD) rats are indirectly altered by the upper airway obstruction induced by the injection of Sodium Hyaluronate. The respiratory pressures (RPs) in the upper airways, the APs in the common carotid arteries in the six SD model rats and six SD control rats are simultaneously measured and analyzed by Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition(EEMD)-based Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT). The differentially or significantly regulated proteins in the common carotid arteries from the SD model and control rats are examined by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE). The results demonstrate that the mean frequencies and normalized mean energy densities for some Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) of the RPs and APs in the SD model rats are significantly different from those in the SD control rats, among all the regulated proteins, one protein is significantly up-regulated and three are significantly down-regulated, two subsets of proteins consistently exhibit significant differences in abundance and are likely to play key roles in arterial remodeling. The analysis of biomechanics and proteomics presented in this report may provide a mechanobiology approach for quantitatively investigating the relationship between mechanical stress and arterial remodeling at protein level.