Osteoarthritis from a clinical standpoint is defined as the progressive loss of articular cartilage accompanied by subarticular bone remodelling and is a highly prevalent disease which affects as many as 27 million people in the US. Currently, there are no effective treatments available and often involve surgical intervention. Therefore, a systems approach is required to analyse the response of resident cartilage cells to physiological and pathophysiological load. In order to gain additional understanding of the underlying biology, an extensive proteomic profile of the chondrocyte cell response was investigated.
Porcine cartilage tissue was used as a model organism to assess various loading regimes for introducing impact stress prior to the analysis of human derived samples. Proteins were then extracted, and data acquired using an ion mobility, data independent approach (HDMSE). Samples were acquired in a random fashion and as technical triplicates. The data were processed using Progenesis QI for Proteomics and searched against a Uniprot Porcine specific database, with 1% FDR. Curated results were interrogated using Ingenuity to derive pathways of biological significance. The protein markers identified provided additional insight into the characteristics of cartilage and the underlying biology. These markers are shown to be indicative of impact stress and potentially markers of osteoarthritis. Future work will focus on transitioning these markers into a high throughput assay for potential clinical utility.