Chondrocyte Gene Expression in Proliferative and Hypertrophic Chondrocytes of Chick

Longitudinal bone growth depends upon the execution of an intricate series of cellular activities by epiphyseal growth plate chondrocytes. In order to better understand these coordinated events, microarray analysis was used to compare gene expression in chondrocytes isolated from the proliferative and hypertrophic zones of the avian growth plate. In this experiment we compared pooled samples of proliferative and hypertrophic chondrocytes isolated from the chick growth plate. The expression of 745 genes was found to differ 3-fold or greater at the 0.05 level of probability. We examined 8 samples using arrays: 4 from proliferative and 4 from hypertrophic chondrocytes.