Structural and Functional Maturation of Distal Femoral Cartilage and Bone During Postnatal Development and Growth in Humans and Mice

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Sample Preparation and Imaging

With Institutional Review Board approval, clinical CT scans were obtained from 6 patients (range: 3.9–11.9 years; mean: 8.2 years) with tibial torsion abnormalities but morphologically normal distal femora at 0.4 to 0.6 mm in-plane resolution and 0.63 mm slice thickness (GE Lightspeed VCT; GE Healthcare, Piscataway, NJ, USA).

The structure of mouse knee joints was assessed by micro–computed tomography (μCT) and histology. With Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee approval, both hindlimbs

Gross Morphology of the Developing Distal Femur: Human and Mouse

The overall size and shape of both human (Figs. 1A and 2A) and mouse (Figs. 1B and 2B) distal femoral bone-cartilage interface changed markedly over the evaluated growth period, as visualized by μCT in coronal (Fig. 1a) and sagittal (Fig. 1b) planes, and in 3-D reconstructions (see Fig. 2).

In the human, the femoral growth plate was situated just proximal to the posterior edge of the condyles and was relatively flat in the transverse plane (Figs. 1A-b and 2A-b, c). At age 4 years, femoral

Discussion

Development of the distal femoral bone-cartilage interface was generally similar between humans and mice, with subtle differences in condyle and trochlea morphology between the 2 species (see Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3). Distal femur size increased linearly up to age 12 years in humans and day 30 in mice, with transepicondylar widths of 79 mm and 2.7 mm, respectively. In both species, the distal femoral SOC began with a rounded contour, followed by protrusion of the condyles and trochlear ridges

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    This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute through the HHMI Professors Program (to UCSD for R.L.S.). Additional individual support was received through NSF Graduate Fellowships (to E.F.C.) and UCSD Chancellor’s Research scholarship (to R.H.). This project acknowledges the use of the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing’s “MATLAB on the TeraGrid” experimental computing resource funded by NSF grant 0844032 in partnership with Purdue University, Dell, The MathWorks, and Microsoft.

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