Transcriptomic profiling of cartilage ageing

The musculoskeletal system is severely affected by the ageing process, with many tissues undergoing changes that lead to loss of function and frailty. Articular cartilage is susceptible to age related diseases, such as osteoarthritis. Applying RNA-Seq to young and old equine cartilage, we identified an over-representation of genes with reduced expression relating to extracellular matrix, degradative proteases, matrix synthetic enzymes, cytokines and growth factors in cartilage from older donors. Here we describe the contents and quality controls in detail for the gene expression and related results published by Peffers and colleagues in Arthritis Research and Therapy 2013 associated with the data uploaded to ArrayExpress (E-MTAB-1386).