Fig. 3.

A) Heatmaps view of z-scored expression profiles of OA-related transcripts between APM and TKA samples. Hierarchical clustering separated the study patients into two clusters. B) Enriched human connective tissue diseases & development functions of OA-related transcripts highly expressed in TKA samples (top, yellow line indicates the number of genes identified in each term) and OA-related transcripts highly expressed in APM samples (bottom, blue line indicate the number of genes identified in each term). C) Connections within OA-related transcripts, and connections between OA-related transcripts and TNF. Blue dash line: co-expression relation. Orange solid line: Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) and Cleavage relation. TNF was not significantly different between TKA and APM meniscus, but showed higher expression variance only in TKA meniscus. D) A number of selected transcripts that showed differential expression between APM and TKA samples. Student’s T-test was used to detect the significant deference. E) Real-time PCR validation showed that all of the 10 transcripts validated exhibited same expression pattern as that of microarrays (top row = genes elevated in TKA meniscus, bottom row = genes elevated in APM meniscus)