Fig. 3

Osteopontin induced the upregulation of HOTAIR in chondrocytes from OA patients. To explore the interaction between them, osteopontin was used to treat chondrocytes at dosages of 0, 1, 5 and 10 µg/ml, followed by measuring the expression of HOTAIR by RT-qPCR (a). To test whether HOTAIR can also regulate osteopontin, HOTAIR overexpression and knockdown was achieved by transfecting HOTAIR expression vector or siRNA into chondrocytes, followed by confirmation of transfections by RT-qPCR (b). The effects of HOTAIR overexpression and knockdown on the expression of osteopontin were analyzed by RT-qPCR (c) and ELISA (d). All experiments were repeated 3 times and mean ± SD values