Pericyte-specific TGF-β signaling is crucial for infarct vasculature maturation and preventing adverse dilative remodeling post-myocardial infarction.
In the healing infarct, cardiac pericytes upregulate expression of fibrosis-associated genes, exhibiting matrix-synthetic and matrix-remodeling profiles. A fraction of infarct pericytes exhibits expression of fibroblast identity markers. Pericyte-specific TGF-β signaling plays a central role in maturation of the infarct vasculature and protects from adverse dilative remodeling, but it does not modulate fibrotic remodeling.
Alex et al. (Fri,) studied this question.