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Bone regeneration and repair is a goal of many skeletal therapies and numerous agents positively or negatively impact these processes. New therapeutic agents and effective model systems are continually sought to identify agents and characterize their mechanisms of action are in con ...

Long considered a disease of post-menopausal women, osteoporosis is increasingly being recognized among the growing population of elderly men. Androgen deficiency may be associated with an increase of bone resorption in elderly men and so, with remodeling imbalance and fracture ris ...

Ovariectomy-induced osteopenia in the rat produces skeletal responses similar to that in a post-menopausal woman. In the ovariectomized (ovx) rat, high bone turnover, and subsequent bone loss, like in the human post-menopausal condition, can be prevented by estrogen replacement. Bec ...

Osteoblasts are the sole cell responsible for bone formation in vivo (1). Although genetic techniques have been extremely valuable to study the functions of certain genes in these cells in vivo, this approach is time consuming and expensive. An alternative loss-of-function approach that h ...

Adenoviruses have a number advantages as gene delivery vectors, including ability to transduce a wide variety of non-dividing and dividing cells with high efficiency, relative ease of construction, and ability to be purified as high-titer viral stocks. These characteristics make ade ...

Gene delivery by retroviruses is an easy and safe tool to stably over express a gene of interest and determine its role in a cell model. The gene of interest is cloned into the multiple cloning site of a retroviral vector that also contains a packaging signal and an antibiotic resistance marker for select ...

Normal cell growth and differentiation of bone cells requires the sequential expression of cell type specific genes to permit lineage specification and development of cellular phenotypes. Transcriptional activation and repression of distinct sets of genes support the anabol ...

Transcription factors play pivotal roles in the control of cell growth and differentiation in health and disease. In the post-genomic era, it has become possible to locate the regions occupied by transcription factors throughout the genome, leading to better understanding of their mech ...

Laser capture microdissection (LCM) method allows selection of individual or clustered cells from intact tissues. This technology enables one to pick cells from tissues that are difficult to study individually, sort the anatomical complexity of these tissues, and make the cells avail ...

Regulatory machinery for gene expression, replication, and repair are architecturally organized in nuclear microenvironments. This compartmentalization provides threshold concentrations of macromolecules for the organization and assembly of regulatory compl ...

This chapter presents current methods for mapping quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in natural populations especially in humans. We discussed the experimental designs for QTL mapping, traditional methods adopted such as linkage mapping approaches and methods for linkage disequi ...

Monitoring gene expression in vitro and in vivo, is crucial when analyzing osteogenesis and developing effective bone gene therapy protocols. Until recently, molecular analytical tools were only able to detect protein expression either in vitro or in vivo. These systems include histo ...

The large increase in interest in micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) over the last decade reflects the+ need for a method able to non-destructively visualize the internal three-dimensional structure of an object. Thereby, the real beauty of computed tomography lies in the fact that it is a ...

Mechanical signals are major regulators of skeletal homeostasis as the addition of exogenous load is followed by enhanced bone formation and the removal of normal loads is followed by net bone loss. The mechanism by which bone cells perceive and respond to changes in their biophysical enviro ...

Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is a 3D imaging technique that has recently begun to permit direct delineation of cartilage structure. This chapter summarizes current methodology for the morphological (e.g., volume, thickness) and compositional imaging of cartilage using quant ...

High-field magnetic resonance (MR), which allows high-resolution imaging, is a powerful research tool to examine and visualize hyaline cartilage of small joints noninvasively. Recent studies have shown that qualitative assessment of degenerative joint disease, derived from MR ...

Three-dimensional imaging of osteoarthritis is so far limited to late stages of the disease. In this chapter we introduce microcomputed tomography (�CT) as a new imaging tool that offers exciting features for diagnosis of earlier disease stages and for disease monitoring. �CT provides sp ...

Because of their limited spatial resolution, current clinical noninvasive imaging modalities (radiography, computed tomography, conventional echography, and magnetic resonance imaging) are able to detect only the late stages of the cartilage degradation. To detect early le ...

Rheumatic diseases are accompanied by a progressive destruction of the cartilage layers of the joints. Although the number of patients suffering from rheumatic diseases is steadily increasing, degradation mechanisms of cartilage are not yet understood, and methods for early diag ...

Since cartilage contains neither blood nor lymph vessels, diffusion is the most important transport process for the supply of cartilage with nutrients and for the removal of metabolic waste products. Therefore, diffusion measurements are of high interest in cartilage research. Diff ...