About the Authors

Yongxin Ren

Contributed equally to this work with: Yongxin Ren, Bo Liu

Affiliations Department of Orthopaedics, The First Affiliated Hospital, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China, The Research Center for Bone and Stem Cells, Department of Anatomy, Histology and Embryology, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China

Bo Liu

Contributed equally to this work with: Yongxin Ren, Bo Liu

Affiliations Department of Orthopaedics, The First Affiliated Hospital, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China, Department of Orthopaedics, The Liyang People's Hospital, Changzhou, China

Yuxu Feng

Affiliations Department of Orthopaedics, The First Affiliated Hospital, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China, The Research Center for Bone and Stem Cells, Department of Anatomy, Histology and Embryology, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China

Lei Shu

Affiliation The Research Center for Bone and Stem Cells, Department of Anatomy, Histology and Embryology, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China

Xiaojian Cao

Affiliation Department of Orthopaedics, The First Affiliated Hospital, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China

Andrew Karaplis

Affiliation Department of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

David Goltzman

Affiliation Department of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Dengshun Miao

dsmiao@njmu.edu.cn

Affiliation The Research Center for Bone and Stem Cells, Department of Anatomy, Histology and Embryology, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: DSM. Performed the experiments: YXR BL YXF LS. Analyzed the data: DSM YXR BL XJC. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: AK DG. Wrote the paper: DSM YXR.