A flawed masterpiece: Human knee evolved in lockstep with osteoarthritis, study says

April 7, 2021

Image2From the Harvard Gazette: 

"In a new paper published in Cell, “Evolutionary Selection and Constraint on Human Knee Chondrocyte Regulation Impacts Osteoarthritis Risk,” researchers exploring the genetic features that help make this sophisticated joint possible found that the regulatory switches involved in its development also play a role in this partially heritable disease, which afflicts at least 250 million people worldwide.

Terence D. Capellini, Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and the paper’s corresponding author, explained it in terms of a burden our knees literally endure." (Read More