Figure 2

Interleukin (IL)-17 upregulates the expression of Bcl-2 in synoviocytes in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). (A) Fibroblast-like synoviocytes from patients with RA (RA-FLSs) (n = 3) and fibroblast-like synoviocytes from patients with osteoarthritis (OA-FLSs) (n = 3) were cultured with IL-17 (0, 1 and 10 ng/ml) for 12 hours. The mRNA expression of Bcl-2 and Bax was evaluated by real-time PCR. The Bcl-2/Bax ratio is shown in the right panel. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01 compared with the untreated group. (B) RA-FLSs (n = 3) and OA-FLSs (n = 3) were cultured with IL-17 (0, 1 and 10 ng/ml) for 12 hours. The expression of Bcl-2 and Bax was measured by western blot. The representative results are shown in the left panel. The Bcl-2/Bax ratio is shown in the right panel. **P < 0.01 compared with the untreated group. (C) RA-FLSs (n = 3) and OA-FLSs (n = 3) were cultured with IL-17 (0, 10 ng/ml) for 12 hours. FLSs were stained with anti-Bcl-2 antibody. Stained cells are shown in brown. (D) IL-17 promoted the proliferation of RA-FLSs, but not that of OA-FLSs. The proliferation of synoviocytes was determined using a CCK-8 kit as described in Materials and methods. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01 compared with the untreated group. (E) The expression of IL-17RA mRNA in OA and RA FLSs was evaluated by real-time PCR. *P < 0.05 compared with OA.