Unsupervised DEGs analysis of SMCs revealed increased expression in Abcb8ECKO of TGF-β-pathway genes such as Tgfb1, Tgfb2, Tgfb3, Mmp2 and Col1a1, inflammatory genes such as Ccl2 (encoding for MCP1) and Csf1 as well as atherosclerosis-associated genes including Egr1 [39,40], Sqstm1 [41,42], Irf1 [43], Sox4 [44,45] and Xylt1 [46] (Fig. 4E; Supplementary Fig. 3). This evidence concerns the gene SQSTM1 and atherosclerosis.