A chondrocyte is the cell that lives inside cartilage and maintains it. Chondrocytes make cartilage's building materials and also the enzymes, including MMP13, that break it down.
Also called cartilage cell.
In 1996, researchers found that human chondrocytes make MMP13, and that the cells lining the joint did not (Reboul 1996). Chondrocytes from damaged cartilage made about 9.5 times as much MMP13 protein as those from normal cartilage (Reboul 1996).
Most of the research on this site uses chondrocytes taken from human donors, often during knee or hip surgery, and grown in a dish (Primrose 2023; Imagawa 2011). They are provoked with an inflammatory messenger or another trigger, and researchers measure what they make. Chondrocytes from older donors made significantly more MMP13 when provoked than those from younger donors (Forsyth 2005).
Chondrocytes keep their own circadian clock, and disturbing it raised MMP13 (Snelling 2016). A control protein called SOX9 keeps them making cartilage genes such as type II collagen and aggrecan (Primrose 2023).
MMP13, short for matrix metalloproteinase-13 and also called collagenase-3, is an enzyme that cuts collagen. Cartilage cells make it, and of the collagen-cutting enzymes...
Not on its own. In healthy ankle cartilage from 30 donors aged 16 to 75, all four collagen-cutting enzymes were present but did not change with age. What age changed was...
In human cartilage cells, MMP13 rose in response to inflammatory messengers such as IL-1, oxidative stress, calcium phosphate crystals, a disrupted cell body clock...