Notch signaling is activated in knee-innervating dorsal root ganglia in an osteoarthritis mouse model

Abstract

Purpose: Surgical destabilization of the medial meniscus (DMM) is a widely used mouse model to study the onset and progression of posttraumatic osteoarthritis (OA) and OA-associated pain. To explore peripheral neuronal mechanisms of OA pain, we used transcriptome microarrays to perform comprehensive gene expression analysis of knee-innervating dorsal root ganglia (L3-L5 DRG) after DMM surgery. We found that, in addition to known genes related to OA pain (including Ccl2, Cx3cl1, and Ngf), a number of genes encoding molecules in the Notch signaling pathway were regulated (mostly at late stage of disease, i.e.