Transcriptome analysis of CHI3L1 knockdown NP cells

Intervertebral disc degeneration is the main cause of low back pain and the mechanism of which is far from fully revealed. Although multiple factors are related to the intervertebral disc degeneration, inflammation and matrix metabolism dysregulation are the two key factors that play an important role in degeneration. Here, we found that inflammation-related factor CHI3L1 is highly regulated in the nucleus pulposus during degeneration in both RNA and protein level. Immunohistochemical analysis show that the expression of CHI3L1 are NP tissue specific, and increased significantly in the degenerated nucleus pulposus cells. The mechanism of CHI3L1 is thus studied in this experiment. MRNA profiles were done using primary culture cells of normal human intervertebral disc nucleus pulposus (NP) tissue. Each sample were treated with IL-1b, TNF-a, IL-1b+CHI3L1 (100ug/ml) or TNF-a+CHI3L1 (100ug/ml) for 48h.