Do type II collagen-specific antibodies induce cartilage damage in mice independent of inflammation?
The implication of these findings is that an autoimmune response to CII can disrupt articular cartilage, particularly that of the small joints, and the subsequent integrity of the cartilage depends on a balance between breakdown and repair. This has relevance with regard to RA, in which such autoantibodies occur but the inflammatory response may dominate clinically and mask underlying features of the autoimmune response.
This is the first description of a simple and fast hybridization protocol for spermatozoa without a decondensation step, allowing preservation of the morphology of the sperm head that is particularly useful to correlate abnormal spermatozoa with specific chromosome aneuploidies. With this technique we were able to avoid troubles in interpretation of FISH spots that does not depend on the quality of nuclear decondensation, as it is the case in the previously described methods. Our goal was to demonstrate the efficiency of the method without loosing sperm head morphology. Further studies are needed to correlate the aneuploidy rates for specific chromosomes with sperm morphology.