Evolutionary Selection and Constraint on Human Knee Chondrocyte Regulation Impacts Osteoarthritis Risk.

ABSTRACT: During human evolution, the knee adapted to the biomechanical demands of bipedalism by altering chondrocyte developmental programs. This adaptive process was likely not without deleterious consequences to health. Today, osteoarthritis occurs in 250 million people, with risk variants enriched in non-coding sequences near chondrocyte genes, loci that likely became optimized during knee evolution. We explore this relationship by epigenetically profiling joint chondrocytes, revealing ancient selection and recent constraint and drift on knee regulatory elements, which also overlap osteoarthritis variants that contribute to disease heritability by tending to modify constrained functional sequence. We propose a model whereby genetic violations to regulatory constraint, tolerated during knee devel

SUBMITTER: Richard D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7179902 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature