Periodontal ligament-associated protein-1 (PLAP-1)/asporin is a recently identified novel member of the small leucine-rich repeat proteoglycan family. PLAP-1/asporin is involved in chondrogenesis, and its involvement in the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis has been suggested. We report that PLAP-1/asporin is also expressed specifically and predominantly in the periodontal ligament (PDL) and that it negatively regulates the mineralization of PDL cells. In situ hybridization analysis revealed that PLAP-1/asporin was expressed specifically not only in the PDL of an erupted tooth but also in the dental follicle, which is the progenitor tissue of the PDL during tooth development. Overexpression of PLAP-1/asporin in mouse PDL-derived clone cells interfered with both naturally and bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP-2)-induced mineralization of the PDL cells. On the other hand, knockdown of PLAP-1/asporin transcript levels by RNA interference enhanced BMP-2-induced differentiation of PDL cells. Furthermore co-immunoprecipitation assays showed a direct interaction between PLAP-1/asporin and BMP-2 in vitro, and immunohistochemistry staining revealed the co-localization of PLAP-1/asporin and BMP-2 at the cellular level. These results suggest that PLAP-1/ asporin plays a specific role(s) in the periodontal ligament as a negative regulator of cytodifferentiation and mineralization probably by regulating BMP-2 activity to prevent the periodontal ligament from developing non-physiological mineralization such as ankylosis.

Osteopontin is a protein found in the bone-related matrix and plays multiple regulatory roles in mineralizing and non-mineralizing tissue. In osteogenic cell-lines, the expression of osteopontin increases with the progression of differentiation, but both the expression and function of osteopontin vary with the cell type and its activation state. In this study, we examined the expression of osteopontin by clones established from mouse periodontal ligament, in response to inorganic phosphate and fibroblast growth factor (FGF)-2, which can induce periodontal tissue regeneration. The involvement of inorganic phosphate in the expression of osteopontin during the course of cell differentiation of a clone MPDL22 was confirmed by addition of foscarnet, an inorganic phosphate transport inhibitor. Although FGF-2 decreased the mRNA expression of almost every bone-related protein in MPDL22, FGF-2 upregulated the expression of osteopontin in MPDL22 at both mRNA and protein levels. Interestingly, FGF-2 enhanced the concentration of osteopontin in the culture supernatant of MPDL22, whereas inorganic phosphate did not. The FGF-2-induced osteopontin in the culture supernatant seems to be involved in cell survival activity. An immunohistochemical study showed that the FGF-2-induced osteopontin was mainly present in perinuclear matrices while the inorganic phosphate-induced osteopontin was associated with extracellular matrices in addition to perinuclear matrices. The present results indicated that FGF-2 induces unique expression of osteopontin, which may play a role different from the other bone-related proteins during the process of periodontal tissue regeneration by FGF-2.

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In this paper, we propose a flexible implementation technique for QoS control mechanisms where they are implemented as separate modules using the constraint oriented style of real-time LOTOS. For an application, we define and implement QOS-SMIL with (1) dynamic switching and (2) explicit inter-media synchronization facilities. Experimental results show that the proposed technique has some advantages w.r.t. development cost for QoS control mechanisms.