Fig. 1: Vaspin overexpression upregulates OA gene signatures and causes OA.

a,b, Images of Alcian blue or safranin O staining and vaspin immunostaining in human OA cartilage (a) and DMM-operated mouse cartilage (b) (a, n = 8; b, n = 5), with the immunostaining intensity presented to the right of each panel. c, Western blot images (left) and densitometric analyses (right; n = 5) of the indicated proteins in chondrocytes treated with or without recombinant vaspin. d,e, Sankey plot (d) and dot plot (e) of GO enrichment and GSEA of OA signature genes in chondrocytes infected with Ad-control or Ad-vaspin. f, Western blot images (left) and densitometric analyses (right; n = 5) of the indicated proteins in chondrocytes infected with Ad-control or Ad-vaspin. g, Safranin O staining images of joint sections (left) and scoring of OARSI grade (right) from DMM-induced Col2a1–vaspin Tg mice (n = 6). h, Left: representative 3D micro-CT images of the medial subchondral bone plate thickness using color densitometry (n = 5). Right: the stacked-bar plot (right) uses color to show the trabecular bone thickness distributions in the indicated samples. i, Mechanical allodynia, as measured by the von Frey test (n = 7). The values are presented as the mean ± s.e.m. and were assessed using two-tailed t-tests (a and b), one-way ANOVAs with Tukey’s multiple-comparisons test (c and f) or the Mann‒Whitney U test (g and i). **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001. Scale bar, 100 μm.