Mechanism of Jingu Zhitong Gel in treatment of knee osteoarthritis based on IL-17 signaling pathway
In this study, transcriptome sequencing was used to study the mechanism of Jingu Zhitong gel in the treatment of osteoarthritis. We identified the key pathways and key genes for the treatment of KOA by transcriptome sequencing of rat synovial tissue, and completed qPCR validation. The results showed that IL-17 was a targeted pathway in the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis. MMP13, MMP3, cxcl6, CCL17, S100A8, S100A9, Lcn2 and FosB can induce the upregulation of IL-17 signaling pathway, thereby reducing synovial inflammation. This study provides a new idea for the molecular mechanism of Jingu Zhitong gel in the treatment of KOA. Overall design: Specific Pathogen-Free (SPF) male SD rats  were randomly divided into control group, model group, Jingu Zhitong Gel high, medium, and low dose groups (1.24, 0.62, 0.31 g/kg), Votalin ointment group (0.105g/kg), and Qingpeng ointment group (0.105 g/kg), with 10 rats in each group. TheKOAmodel of rats was conducted according to the previous literature description[9], 50µL of MIA solution (40 mg/mL) was injected into the lateral side of the patella using an insulin syringe. Rats in the control group were injected with 50µL of sterile physiological saline. The intervention was initiated on day 1 of model establishment and administered twice a day for 14 days. DESeq2 was used to analyze differentially expressed genes (DEGs),and Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) enrichment analyses were conducted to identify significant pathways. Furthermore, Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was used to identify the key signaling pathways of Jingu Zhitong Gel, and STRING functional protein association network was used to analyze the interaction network, Eight key hub genes of Jingu Zhitong Gel were identified by using the stringapp plugin in Cytoscape. we performed qPCR experiments on eight key hub genes, confirming the accuracy of the analysis results.