Rebuilding Bones

The old saying goes, “I can feel it in my bones”. But when it comes to osteoporosis, most people can't feel it until a seemingly minor bump or fall causes their brittle bones to fracture. Currently, osteoporosis is treated by preventing further bone breakdown. Now researchers investigate whether bone could be rebuilt using specific peptides (short bits of proteins). Bone-building cells arise from osteogenic progenitor cells. So the team screened for peptides that bound to these cells and triggered their maturation into bone-building cells. The winners were YLL3 and YLL8. These peptides were injected into normal mice and mice mimicking osteoporosis. In both cases, bone strength, bone formation and bone mass increased, as revealed by comparing micro-CT images of porous bones (pictured) in normal mice injected with saline (left), YLL3 (middle) or YLL8 (right). More research is now needed to investigate the potential of these peptides as osteoporosis therapies.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Min Jiang and colleagues
• Center for Musculoskeletal Health, Department of Internal Medicine, The University of California at Davis Medical Center, Sacramento, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, August 2020