Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 13 pp 12799—12811

Figure 6. Tomatidine suppresses IL-1β induced degradation of aggrecan and collagen-II in chondrocytes. (A) Representative western blot images and (B) Histogram plot shows the levels of aggrecan and collagen-II proteins relative to GAPDH (internal control) levels in the primary chondrocytes treated for 24 h with 2.5, 5, or 10μM tomatidine alone or in combination with 10ng/mlIL-1β. DMSO was used as control. (C) Immunofluorescence staining images show aggrecan and collagen-II expression in the primary chondrocytes treated for 24 h with 2.5, 5, or 10μM tomatidine alone or in combination with 10ng/mlIL-1β. The nuclei are stained with DAPI. The white arrows indicate the expression of aggrecan and collagen-II. The values are shown as means ± SD of triplicate experiments. #p < 0.05 compared with the control group; *p < 0.05 and **p < 0.01 compared with the IL-1β group.