BIOCHEMICAL AND MOLECULAR HOMOGENEITY IN THE PATELLAR TENDON OF THE IMMATURE PIG

Patellar tendon is widely used for reconstruction of the anterior cruc iate ligament. However, few studies have investigated the tendon's hom ogeneity, a characteristic often assumed of it in experiments. In this study, the assumption that the patellar tendon is homogeneous was tes ted by dividing the central half of the tendon into six sections along its length and width and comparing commonly measured biochemical para meters and patterns of gene expression among these sections. No signif icant differences were found between the sections for any of the studi ed parameters: water content (p > 0.5), DNA content (p > 0.9). total c ollagen content (p > 0.8), amount of type-I collagen (p > 0.7) or type -III collagen (p > 0.7), or expression of mRNA (p > 0.9). Far all para meters. the minimum power value for statistical analyses was greater t han 0.80. It was concluded that the central half of the tendon is homo geneous in terms of all of the measured parameters. The results provid e important information for the many experiments that sample part of t he patellar tendon to infer the characteristics of the whole tendon, e .g., biopsy studies.