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Updated: Oct 2, 2025
An Ex Vivo Tissue Culture Model of Cartilage Remodeling in Bovine Knee Explants
Published on: November 3, 2019
Identification of biomarkers and regulatory networks for cartilage damage patients
1State Key Laboratory of Veterinary Etiological Biology; Key Laboratory of Veterinary Parasitology of Gansu Province; Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 730046 Lanzhou, Gansu, China.
Background:
The aim of this study was to mine cartilage damage and regeneration-related biomarkers and identify the gene regulatory networks of cartilage damage.
Methods:
A gene expression data set (GSE129147) containing damaged and control samples collected from the knee of the same patients was employed. R package limma was used to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs), and clusterProfiler was performed for the GO and KEGG functional enrichment analysis. Cytoscape plug-ins of CytoHubba and MCODE were applied to investigate protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, modules, and hub genes.
Results:
We identified 422 DEGs that were involved in skeletal system development, bone development, ossification, mesenchyme development, mesenchymal cell differentiation, connective tissue development, osteoblast differentiation, and extracellular matrix. We dug out 30 hub genes, identified three PPI modules, and constructed a miRNA regulatory network for DEGs. The miRNAs of the DEGs were predicted by miRNet, and the miRNA-mRNA network displayed some important miRNAs such as miR-335-5p, miR-92a-3p, and miR-98-5p.
Conclusions:
Collectively, these results have the potential to clarify the mechanism of cartilage damage and to assist us in discovering the damage and repair-related biomarkers.
