Does large-scale gene expression profiling reveal major pathogenetic pathways of cartilage degeneration in osteoarthritis?
Our findings provide a reference data set on gene alterations in OA cartilage and, importantly, indicate major mechanisms underlying central cell biologic alterations that occur during the OA disease process. These results identify molecular targets that can be further investigated in the search for therapeutic interventions.
We have demonstrated a role for miR-26a, miR-145 and miR-26a in TRAIL-induced apoptosis. Further these results show that RNAi screening enriches for siRNAs with relevant off-target effects. Some of these effects can be identified by the over-representation of certain seed sequences in high-scoring siRNAs and we demonstrate the usefulness of such systematic analysis of enriched seed sequences.