Cloning of a mRNA Preferentially Expressed in Chondrocytes by Differential Display-PCR from a Human Chondrocytic Cell Line That Is Identical with Connective Tissue Growth Factor (CTGF) mRNA

Identification of an RNA element that confers post-transcriptional repression of connective tissue growth factor/hypertrophic chondrocyte specific 24 (ctgf/hcs24) gene: Similarities to retroviral RNA-protein interactions

“…Generally in a variety of tissues, the level of CTGF expression is low, or not detectable with a few exceptions. One of these with remarkable CTGF expression is the hypertrophic chondrocyte (Nakanishi et al, 1997). High level of CTGF expression is observed only in the cells in hypertrophic zone in growth cartilage, suggesting its speci®ed roles in the ®nal stages of chondrocyte di erentiation.…”

“…The complex and integrated functionality of CTGF is also well-represented in its comprehensive roles in endochondral ossi®cation, most of which have been uncovered in our series of recent studies (Nakanishi et al, 1997;Nishida et al, 1998). In those studies, CTGF was initially rediscovered as a gene product which was preferentially expressed in a human chondrocytic cell line, HCS-2/8 (Takigawa et al, 1989;Enomoto and Takigawa, 1992;Zhu et al, 1994;Ohba et al 1995;Nakanishi et al, 1997;Hattori et al, 1998). Our subsequent analyses further revealed its central roles in the growth and di erentiation of primary chondrocytes.…”

“…Therefore, CTGF has been shown to promote almost all the stages of chondrocyte growth and di erentiation towards endochondral ossi®cation. It is worth stating that, under physiological conditions in vivo, high level of CTGF expression is restrictively observed in hypertrophic chondrocytes ± the last form of the chondrocyte di erentiation (Nakanishi et al, 1997).…”

“…It is widely recognized that transcription of the ctgf gene is induced by transforming growth factor b (TGF-b) (Grotendorst et al, 1996;Nakanishi et al, 1997;Kothapalli et al, 1998). In addition, the fact that high levels of CTGF expression is limited to particular types of cells, such as hypertrophic chondrocytes, suggests that expression of the ctgf gene may be under repressed conditions generally in vivo.…”

Activation of connective tissue growth factor gene by the c-Maf and Lc-Maf transcription factors

“…CTGF is expressed in a variety of tissues, including hypertrophic chondrocytes [28,29]. CTGF directly regulates the proliferation and differentiation of chondrocytes and osteoblasts [28,30], stimulates angiogenesis in vivo [28,31], and promotes extracellular matrix production in connective tissue [32].…”