Silencing UHRF1 enhances cell autophagy to prevent articular chondrocytes from apoptosis in osteoarthritis through PI3K/AKT/mTOR signaling pathway

Abstract Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common chronic degenerative joint disease, and chondrocyte apoptosis is one of most important pathological changes of OA pathogenesis. Growing studies have shown that Ubiquitin-like with PHD and RING finger domains 1 (UHRF1) is an important epigenetic regulatory factor that regulates cell proliferation and apoptosis of various tumors, but its role in OA remains ill-defined. In the present study, we found that UHRF1 expression was increased in human OA cartilage tissues, compared with normal cartilage tissues. Interleukin-1β (IL-1β), a major inflammatory cytokine that promotes cartilage degradation in OA, was used to stimulate primary human chondrocytes in vitro. The expression of UHRF1 was also enhanced in IL-1β-induced chondrocytes. Moreover, down-regulation of UHRF1 induced an increase on cell proliferation and autophagy, and a decrease on apoptosis of chondrocytes after IL-1β treatment. Further data indicated that silencing UHRF1 attenuated the up-regulation of IL-1β on phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)/protein kinase B (AKT)/mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway in chondrocytes. Then, an activator of PI3K weakened the effect of UHRF1 silencing on cell proliferation, autophagy, apoptosis of IL-1β-induced chondrocytes, and the cell autophagy special inhibitor 3-methyladenine (3-MA) also showed a same impact on UHRF1, hence suggesting that knockdown of UHRF1 enhances cell autophagy to protect chondrocytes from apoptosis in OA through PI3K/AKT/mTOR signaling pathway. In conclusion, our study suggests that UHRF1 may be a potential regulator of chondrocyte apoptosis in the pathogenesis of OA.