Sandra Shefelbine
Northeastern University, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Bones are not fixed structures: their shape reflects both the traits an animal inherits and the forces it experiences while alive. Separating those two influences is a long-standing puzzle in biology, and it matters for people too, since exercise, aging and bone disease all change the skeleton.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Biology
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
bone mechanobiology
mechanoadaptation
mechanotransduction
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Test whether limb bone shape in deer mice reflects inherited differences or lifetime loading, by raising burrowing oldfield mice (Peromyscus polionotus) and non-burrowing cactus mice (P. eremicus) in chambers that allow or prevent digging and comparing bone geometry by high-resolution CT.
- Measure how bones move and how muscles load them during running and digging using microXROMM, an X-ray video technique that reconstructs three-dimensional skeletal motion in small animals.
- Determine how sensitive each mouse species' bones are to force by applying controlled loads to leg bones and tracking structural, cellular and gene expression responses, testing whether burrowing species have altered mechanical sensitivity at the molecular level.
- Characterize mechanosensitive calcium signaling in the stem cells and cartilage cells of regenerating axolotl limbs, and identify the mechanically triggered ion channels that carry these signals in a living, growing limb.
- Track the location of yes-associated protein (YAP), a protein that moves into the nucleus when cells sense mechanical load, during axolotl limb regeneration to link mechanical stimulus to molecular response.
- Develop whole-mount imaging workflows that combine fluorescence in situ hybridization (fluorescent labeling of mRNA) with light sheet microscopy, so gene activity can be mapped in three dimensions onto the mechanical environment of the limb.
More about the research
Work in this lab asks how cells and tissues sense mechanical forces and translate them into changes in bone shape, strength and growth, using animals that make the question tractable — burrowing and non-burrowing mice, and a salamander that regrows entire limbs.
Why it matters
Understanding how mechanical loading shapes the skeleton informs how exercise builds and maintains bone, how bone is lost with aging and disease, and how physical therapy might be designed to guide normal growth in children. The deer mouse work also delivers imaging capability — three-dimensional X-ray motion capture in very small animals — usable by other biomedical studies, and the regeneration work could inform materials that adapt to mechanical demand.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Elizabeth Brainerd
Brown University, RI·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether digging during growth changes limb bone thickness, internal architecture and shape, by raising burrowing oldfield mice and non-burrowing cactus mice with or without digging access and scanning their bones with high-resolution CT.
Chia-Lung Wu
University of Rochester, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Determine how mechanical loading switches on WNT16 in chondrocytes through the force-sensing calcium channel TRPV4, by loading human stem cell-derived and hip chondrocytes in agarose gels and sequencing their genetic and epigenetic controls.
Andres Bendesky
Columbia University, NY·Genetics
Quantify how inbreeding affects reproduction, survival, morphology and social network interactions in a 20-generation wild house mouse population, and map responsible genes with recessive-model genome-wide association studies.
The school
Northeastern University: 27 labs on PI Pages, $347M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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