Elizabeth Brainerd
Brown University, RI·Ecology & Evolution
Why does a bone have the shape it does? Part of the answer is inherited, passed down through evolution, and part comes from how an animal uses its body while it grows.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
Physiology
- Topics
bone adaptation
mechanoadaptation
Peromyscus
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Measure how limb bones move in three dimensions and estimate muscle forces during running and digging in deer mice, using microXROMM, an X-ray video technique for tracking skeletal motion in small animals.
- Compare how sensitive bone is to mechanical force in the two species by applying controlled loads to leg bones and measuring structural, cellular and gene-expression responses.
- Identify genes whose response to mechanical loading differs between burrowing and non-burrowing Peromyscus species, to test whether the evolution of digging changed bone sensitivity at the molecular level.
More about the research
Separating these two influences is a basic question about how form follows function in living things, and it bears on how exercise, aging and disease affect human bones.
Why it matters
Knowing how physical activity reshapes bone, and how much that response is fixed by inheritance, could inform the understanding of bone diseases and age-related bone loss. It could also guide exercise recommendations for keeping bones strong throughout life. The new imaging tools for tracking bone and muscle motion in very small animals could support future biomedical research.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sandra Shefelbine
Northeastern University, MA·Biomedical Engineering
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.
Glenna Clifton
University of Portland, OR·Ecology & Evolution
Measure bone dimensions and toe splay across many duck species, using CT scans of museum specimens, to find evolutionary patterns in foot skeleton shape.
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
Brown University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $375M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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