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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 15|pp 19282—19292

Evaluation of the cargo contents and potential role of extracellular vesicles in osteoporosis

Jifeng Xu1, Yu Chen1, Dongsheng Yu1, Li Zhang1, Xiaofan Dou1, Gang Wu2, Yaping Wang3, Shuijun Zhang1
  • 1Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital, People’s Hospital of Hangzhou Medical College, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310014, PR China
  • 2Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, the Second People’s Hospital of Fuyang, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 311404, PR China
  • 3Department of Cardiology, 2nd Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Zhejiang 310009, PR China
Received: March 9, 2021Accepted: June 4, 2021Published: August 10, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203264

Copyright: © 2021 Xu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Osteoporosis is a common aging-related disease diagnosed primarily using bone mineral density (BMD). Extracellular vesicles (EVs) remain unexplored in the context of osteoporosis. Towards this, EVs were isolated from plasma of a discovery cohort with 8 non-osteoporotic and 8 osteoporotic individuals, and nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA) revealed a significantly higher EV concentration in osteoporotic individuals (P = 0.003). Moreover, EVs concentration showed a linear correlation with bone mineral density (BMD) values (linear correlation coefficient r = 0.9542, deviation from zero, p < 0.001). Results using a mouse model of osteoporosis confirmed that the number of EVs in mice from hindlimb unloading group was significantly higher than that from the age-matched control group (p = 0.015). TaqMan Real-Time PCR demonstrated that miR-335-5p, -320a, -483-5p, and miR-21-5p, were significantly higher expressed in osteoporotic patients compared with non-osteoporotic individuals. Quantitative real-time PCR shown that Wnt1, Wnt5a, Wnt7a, and Wnt9a mRNAs were lower expressed in osteoporosis derived EVs. In vitro functional assay indicated that osteoporosis derived EVs resulted in reduced mineralization in SaOS-2 cells. In conclusion, these results suggest that osteoporosis increased the secretion of EVs which carry higher expression of miRNAs and decreased expression of Wnt signals, further decreased the mineralization capacity in human osteoblasts.