Exploration of Exosomal miRNAs from Serum and Synovial Fluid in Arthritis Patients.

Yingying Xie,Hongjing Li,Hao Yu,Jianhua Qin,Yuhai Xu,Wenwen Chen,Mengqian Zhao

doi:10.3390/diagnostics12020239

Abstract

Arthritis is caused by inflammation, infection, degeneration, trauma, or other factors that affect approximately 250 million people all over the world. Early diagnosis and prediction are essential for treatment. Exosomes are nanoscale vesicles that participate in the process of joint disease. Serum is the mainly used sources in the study of arthritis-related exosomes, while whether serum exosomes can reflect the contents of synovial fluid exosomes is still unknown. In this work, we separated exosomes from serum and the synovial fluid of osteoarthritis patients and compared their miRNA expression utilizing miRNA sequencing. The results revealed that 31 upregulated and 33 downregulated miRNAs were found in synovial fluid compared to serum. Transcriptome analysis showed that these differentially expressed miRNAs were mainly associated with intercellular processes and metabolic pathways. Our results show that serum-derived exosomes cannot fully represent the exosomes of synovial fluid, which may be helpful for the study of joint diseases and the discovery of early diagnostic biomarkers of arthritis.

Highlights

Arthritis is mainly related to autoimmune reaction, infection, metabolic disorder, trauma, degenerative lesions, and other factors [1]
The exosomes absorbed onto the chitosan scaffolds can be released by Tris buffer for particle size analysis as we reported in our previous work [21]
After the exosomes were released using Tris buffer, only a few white particles could be observed on the surface of the chitosan scaffold. These results reveal that the exosome separation device can capture and release exosomes in a controllable manner

Summary

Introduction

Arthritis is mainly related to autoimmune reaction, infection, metabolic disorder, trauma, degenerative lesions, and other factors [1]. All kinds of cells can release exosomes, and they are found in almost all kinds of body fluids such as blood [5,6,7], urine [8,9], sweat [10], saliva [11], milk [12], and synovial fluid They play an important role in information transmission, metabolism, disease processes, and immune regulation in the human body. They have been used as important biomarkers in liquid biopsies for the early clinical diagnosis of cancer, evaluation of drug efficacy, and monitoring of disease progress [13,14]

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Results

Conclusion