Kalluri et al. (2019) and Gu et al. (2019) described heterogeneity of aortic and adventitial tissue, and created an aortic atlas. Heterogeneity is already evident in healthy tissue, but it is further increased in disease. Heterogeneity in the context of atherosclerosis has been studied in Ldlr knockout mice (Cochain et al., 2018), and resulted in the identification of novel leukocyte (Winkels et al., 2018) and smooth muscle cell (Chappell et al., 2016) clusters. Here, LDLR is linked to atherosclerosis.