Temporal and spatial expression patterns of bone morphogenetic protein 3 in developing zebrafish

Zebrafish: A Suitable Tool for the Study of Cell Signaling in Bone

In recent decades, many studies using the zebrafish model organism have been performed. Zebrafish, providing genetic mutants and reporter transgenic lines, enable a great number of studies aiming at the investigation of signaling pathways involved in the osteoarticular system and at the identification of therapeutic tools for bone diseases. In this review, we will discuss studies which demonstrate that many signaling pathways are highly conserved between mammals and teleost and that genes involved in mammalian bone differentiation have orthologs in zebrafish. We will also discuss as human diseases, such as osteogenesis imperfecta, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis and Gaucher disease can be investigated in the zebrafish model.

The Functions of BMP3 in Rabbit Articular Cartilage Repair

Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) play important roles in skeletal development and repair. Previously, we found fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) induced up-regulation of BMP2, 3, 4 in the process of rabbit articular cartilage repair, which resulted in satisfactory repair effects. As BMP2/4 show a clearly positive effect for cartilage repair, we investigated the functions of BMP3 in rabbit articular cartilage repair. In this paper, we find that BMP3 inhibits the repair of partial-thickness defect of articular cartilage in rabbit by inducing the degradation of extracellular matrix, interfering with the survival of chondrocytes surrounding the defect, and directly inhibiting the expression of BMP2 and BMP4. Meanwhile BMP3 suppress the repair of full-thickness cartilage defect by destroying the subchondral bone through modulating the proliferation and differentiation of bone marrow stem cells (BMSCs), and directly increasing the expression of BMP4. Although BMP3 has different functions in the repair of partial and full-thickness defects of articular cartilage in rabbit, the regulation of BMP expression is involved in both of them. Together with our previous findings, we suggest the regulation of the BMP signaling pathway by BMP3 is essential in articular cartilage repair.