| HRA003746
(Open Access)
|
Anterior cruciate ligament degeneration is an important origin of knee osteoarthritis and a common threat to athletic ability. However, the cellular heterogeneity and underlying mechanisms in the degeneration process remain elusive. To systematically identify and localize cell compartments in normal and degenerated ligaments and investigate how cellular compositions, functions, and interactions participated in the ligamental degeneration, we built a cell atlas of the healthy and degenerated human ligament using scRNA-seq and spRNA-seq. We identified new fibroblast subgroups contributed to the disease and mapped out their spatial distribution in the tissue and revealed two stages of the degenerative process. We compared the cellular interactions between different tissue states and identified important signaling pathways may contribute to the disease. |
