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In vitro manipulation of human chondrocyte and intervertebral disc cell morphology

In monolayer culture, proliferating chondrocytes exhibit a fibroblast-like morphology and synthesize little extracellular matrix; human intervertebral disc cells behave similarly. Such dedifferentiated chondrocytes and disc cells can be induced to adopt a more rounded morphology and increase synthesis of matrix components, however, when cultured in 3 dimensional systems (Benya & Schaffer 1982; Gruber et al. 1997) The capacity to induce this process in vitro is potentially of therapeutic value, but the mechanisms which regulate such re-differentiation are poorly understood. This study investigated chondrocyte and disc cell morphology and proliferation in response to bistratene A, a cyclicpolyether which activates PKC delta (Griffiths et al. 1996). In addition, preliminary experiments have examined disc cell morphology when cultured on different collagen substrates.