Bone Abstracts

During the last 12 months we have worked on 2 projects that I will talk about at the ECTS 2014 conference. The first is our work on collagen fibril formation at the cell surface, using tendon as a model tissue. We have shown that the transport of newly-formed fibrils at the plasma membrane requires non-muscle myosin II. The second is that tendon is a peripheral clock tissue. We have shown that the tendons in mice lacking circadian rhythm have abnormal collagen fibril assembly and calcific deposits. Importantly, we show that the tendon clock diminishes with age in wild-type mice that also develop age-related calcific tendinopathy. This phenotype is identical to what is seen in human age-related and injury-related calcific tendinopathy. My talk will be divided equally between these two topics.