Unveiling inflammatory and prehypertrophic cell populations as key contributors to knee cartilage degeneration in osteoarthritis using multi-omics data integration

Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analysis of human knee articular cartilage tissue to present a comprehensive transcriptome landscape and osteoarthritis (OA)-critical cell populations.

Single-cell RNA sequencing and spatially resolved transcriptomic technology have been applied to characterise the cellular heterogeneity of human knee articular cartilage which were collected from 8 OA donors, and 3 non-OA control donors, and a total of 19 samples. The novel chondrocyte population and marker genes of interest were validated by immunohistochemistry staining, quantitative real-time PCR, etc. The OA-critical cell populations were validated through integrative analyses of publicly available bulk RNA sequencing data and large-scale genome-wide association studies.