TY  - JOUR
A1  - Maly, Kathrin
A1  - Schaible, Inna
A1  - Riegger, Jana
A1  - Brenner, Rolf Erwin
A1  - Meurer, Andrea
A1  - Zaucke, Frank
T1  - The expression of thrombospondin-4 correlates with disease severity in osteoarthritic knee cartilage
T2  - International journal of molecular sciences
N2  - Osteoarthritis (OA) is a progressive joint disease characterized by a continuous degradation of the cartilage extracellular matrix (ECM). The expression of the extracellular glycoprotein thrombospondin-4 (TSP-4) is known to be increased in injured tissues and involved in matrix remodeling, but its role in articular cartilage and, in particular, in OA remains elusive. In the present study, we analyzed the expression and localization of TSP-4 in healthy and OA knee cartilage by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), immunohistochemistry, and immunoblot. We found that TSP-4 protein expression is increased in OA and that expression levels correlate with OA severity. TSP-4 was not regulated at the transcriptional level but we detected changes in the anchorage of TSP-4 in the altered ECM using sequential protein extraction. We were also able to detect pentameric and fragmented TSP-4 in the serum of both healthy controls and OA patients. Here, the total protein amount was not significantly different but we identified specific degradation products that were more abundant in sera of OA patients. Future studies will reveal if these fragments have the potential to serve as OA-specific biomarkers.
KW  - thrombospondin-4
KW  - osteoarthritis
KW  - extracellular matrix
KW  - biomarker
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/50445
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-504454
SN  - 1422-0067
SN  - 1661-6596
N1  - This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).
VL  - 20
IS  - 2, Art. 447
SP  - 1
EP  - 17
PB  - Molecular Diversity Preservation International
CY  - Basel
ER  -