Autophagy effects on chondrocyte survival and cartilage damage / 中国组织工程研究

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND:Autophagy is the celular process of lysosomal pathway processing by endogenous substrates, which exists in the body cels and has been considered as type II programmed cel death. Autophagy may be a protective or balancing mechanism of normal chondrocytes. OBJECTIVE:To discuss the latest research progress in autophagy and cartilage damage aiming to better understanding the role of autophagy in cartilage damage and repair. METHODS:A computer-based search of CNKI, Wanfang database and PubMed database was performed for articles relevant to autophagy and cartilage damage published in recent 20 years with the key words of autophagy, cartilage, chondrocytes, beclin1, LC3 in Chinese and English. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Intra-articular chondrocytes can response to the changes in the microenvironment so as to adjust the extracelular matrix metabolism and maintain the biological function of articular cartilage. Hypoxic environment in which chondrocytes eixt is an important factor to causes autophagy. Autophagy is a normal balance or protection mechanism of chondrocytes. Studies on the correlation of autophagy with cartilage damage have made considerable progress in recent years, but stil in its infancy. Atg discovery at the molecular level deepens the understanding of autophagy, but the induction of cartilage autophagy pathway, signal transduction, and their effects on the survival of chondrocytes are not clear yet, which need further studies.