Fig. 2

– Workflow for thoracic aortic disease study. To conduct a proper multi-omics study of thoracic aortic disease, a clear and defined workflow must be followed, ranging from the proper selection of the disease model to the correct analysis of the resulting -omics data. Of crucial impact is the collection of thoracic aortic tissues or biofluids such as whole blood, plasma, or serum from both human donors as well as from a number of available well-defined animal models of aortopathies (Additional file 1: Table S1). Attention should be paid to the enrolment of the proper healthy controls and to correctly dissect different pathological conditions (e.g., sporadic and syndromic aneurysms). Depending on experimental aims/contexts, these samples can be used for aortic cell isolation and culture in standard 2D in vitro supports as well as in specific bioreactors