Expression data from mandibular condylar cartilage of rats

Mandibular condylar cartilage (MCC) has many distinctive features reviewed in the literature, hence it would be expected that the genetic regulation of the biological process in the MCC to be different from those of other articular hyaline cartilages and epiphyseal growth cartilages. In addition, The MCC is a multi-zonal fibrocartilage containing different types of cells, which are well characterized histomorphologically, but the factors governing their morphological transition across the zones are not fully understood. Therefore, we can speculate that unique genetic profiles in vivo might exist within the four zones of MCC. We used microarrays to obtain new insights into the MCC cells by performing a comprehensive zone-specificgene expression profile analysis for each zone of the MCC isolated from 5-week-old rats using LCM technology and compare it to femoral condylar cartilage (FCC) profiles. Sprague-Dawley 5-week-old male rat (Rattus norvegicus) was sacrificed. MCC and FCC specimens were harvested, and then to obtain homogeneous cell populations, we followed our optimized laser-capture microdissection (LCM) protocol described earlier to collect RNA from the four zones of MCC individually thereby four groups: fibrous zone (FZ), proliferative zone (PZ), mature chondrocytes zone (MZ), and hypertrophic chondrocytes zone (HZ) were prepared. Similarly LCM sample was prepared from FCC tissue as a reference sample. LCM-RNA samples were then amplified, labelled, fragmentated, and hybridized on Affymetrix microarrays chips.