miR-137 suppresses cell growth and extracellular matrixdegradation through regulating ADAMTS-5 in chondrocytes

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common degenerative joint disease. microRNAs (miRNAs) have been showen to act critical roles in several diseases including OA. However, the involvement and underlying mechanism of miR-137 in development of OA remains unkown. In our study, we firstly showed that IL-1β decreased the expression of miR-137 in the chondrocytes and we demonstrated that the miR-37 expression level was lower in the OA cases than in the control patients. Dual-luciferase reporter analysis was performed to confirm that ADAMTS-5 was a direct target gene of miR-137. Furthermore, we indicated that elevated expression of miR-137 decreased the protein expression of ADAMTS-5 in the chondrocytes. In additional, we showed that IL-1β induces the ADAMTS-5 expression in the chondrocytes. The ADAMTS-5 expression level was higher in the OA cases than in the control patients. We showed that the expression of ADAMTS-5 was negatively correlated with the miR-137 expression level in OA tissues. Overexpression of miR-137 suppressed cell growth, extracellular matrix (ECM) degradation and inflammation in chondrocytes. These preliminary data elucidated that miR-137 suppressed OA progression via inhibiting cell growth, inflammation and ECM degradation.