Congratulations to Hyunggwi Song, Prof. Kersh, and collaborator Dr. John Polk of Anthropology on recently publishing their paper entitled ‘Rat bone properties and their relationship to gait during growth’ in the Journal of Experimental Biology (link to paper). They used a combination of motion capture, in vivo micro-CT, and finite element modeling to learn about bone adaptation as it related to gait changes in growing rats. What they found was that:
1. Bone (re)modeling responds to the change in posture during growth, and posture was more correlated with structural properties than with material properties.
2. Allometric analysis of second moment of inertia and finite element analysis at the diaphysis suggest that bone properties are growing to best accommodate bending loads.
Check out the cool video below showing some of the methods used in this paper.