MAFB and osteoarthritis: In order to investigate the independent role of triiodothyronine (T3) in cartilage differentiation and osteoarthritis (OA), we intersected the DEGs from RNA-sequencing data of explant cartilage cultured ex vivo with or without T3)(Supplementary Table S4) with the DEGs identified from the two aforementioned sequencing datasets (GSE114007 and GSE199847).The results indicated that there were 5 commonly upregulated genes (MAFB,C1QTNF1,COL3A1,COL2A1,ANGPTL2), while no shared downregulated genes were found (Fig. 3A).