Differences in Mammalian Target of Rapamycin Gene Expression in the Peripheral Blood and Articular Cartilages of Osteoarthritic Patients and Disease Activity

Figure 1

Relative expression of the genes mTOR (a), ULK1 (b), p21 (c), caspase 3 (d), and TNFα (e) with reference to β-actin determined by real-time PCR analyses in the whole blood of “Low mTOR subset” (𝑛=15), “High mTOR subset” (𝑛=32), and end-stage OA patients (𝑛=14) (set 1) compared with healthy controls (𝑛=27). (f) A relationship between mTOR gene expression measured in the blood or articular cartilage from end-stage OA patients (𝑛=13, set 2). Controls are shown as 1.0 as required for relative quantification with the real-time PCR protocol. Asterisks (∗) indicate significant differences from the control in pairwise comparisons (Student’s unpaired 𝑡-test). Number signs (#) show significant differences in multigroup comparisons using two-way ANOVA followed by the Scheffe’s post-hoc test.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)