Fig. 4

Chronic hypertension results in microglia dynamical changes in the hippocampus of hypertensive rats. Overlay of Uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) map displaying randomly sub-sampled microglia cells from normotensive and hypertensive hippocampus analyzed by flow cytometry in (a) early and (e) late hypertension. (b, f) UMAP plot with color-coded Phenograph-guided clustering with cell identities established based on the investigated surface markers. Representative UMAP plots from normotensive and hypertensive brains displaying microglia sub-clusters corresponding to each cohort. (c, g) Relative frequencies of microglial cells and their respective percentages per cluster in early and late chronic hypertension. (d, h) Heat map displaying normalized median expression values for each population present in each color-coded cluster exhibiting dynamic expression of diverse microglia activation markers (CD200R, CD45, CD86, CD163, MHCII, CD11b/c, P2Y12R, CX3CR1) upon early and late chronic hypertension compared to their respective age-matched normotensive control. Ctrl, Controls; HTN, Hypertension. p-values: ** for p ≤ 0.01; *** for p ≤ 0.001; **** for p ≤ 0.0001