Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
Osteoarthritis has a considerable heritable component, with GWAS variants residing in non-coding sequences near chondrocyte genes; loci which likely became evolutionarily optimized during bipedal knee formation. To explore this relationship, we epigenetically profiled joint chondrocytes, revealing evidence of selection and constraint on human knee-specific regulatory elements. These elements also overlap osteoarthritis loci, with risk variants contributing to disease heritability by altering constrained sequences. Using these findings we then describe a causal enhancer variant present in half the world’s population, showing that it impacts mouse knee-shape and osteoarthritis. Overall, our methods link an evolutionarily novel aspect of anatomy to its pathogenesis.
