Fig. 2.

CUR alone, or in combination with a VO-enriched diet, significantly suppressed cellular infiltration and cartilage degradation in joints of CIA mice. Saline control and CIA mice under different conditions as indicated were euthanized by cardiac puncture under anesthesia on day 29 after the first CII challenge. Hind ankle joints were collected and processed for histology. The paraffin-embedded sagittal sections (5 μm) of hind ankle joints were stained with a H&E to detect the cellular infiltration and b safranin-O for proteoglycan and cartilage degradation. Box plots represent histology scores of H&E-stained and safranin-O-stained joint tissue sections. Percent histology score shown is compared to CIA mice on the normal diet as 100%. GraphPad Prism 7.05 software was used for statistical analyses of histology scores. Kruskal–Wallis one-way ANOVA followed by Dunn’s multiple comparison post hoc test was used to determine the p values (*p ≤ 0.05, **p ≤ 0.01, and ***p ≤ 0.001)