Meeting Abstract
Every day I tap into the knowledge base that Dr. Mimi Koehl laid for me twenty years ago in her undergraduate biomechanics course, Integrative Biology 135. This course and its dynamic professor steered me toward a career in comparative skeletal mechanobiology, where my research considers skeletal tissue mechanics across many length scales, from the whole bone to the single bone cell, utilizing principles of both solid and fluid mechanics. My group’s research examining comparative skeletal plasticity in response to mechanical challenge in tetrapods has shown that there are different strategies by which bone tissue volume and second moments of area can be altered to produce stiffer long bones. Species differences in skeletal adaptive mechanisms may be modulated by differences in cell-level mechanical stimuli, which are caused by mineralized tissue deformations that induce pressure-driven fluid flow through nanometer-scale pores of the bone lacunar-canalicular network (LCN). The flow profile past the osteocytes residing in this network could exhibit characteristics of Poiseuille, Darcy, or Brinkman flow depending upon the geometry of the bone LCN and the dimensions of the protein fibers in the pericellular matrix. Differences in these flow profiles across different species or in pathological disease conditions could affect the mechanoresponsiveness of the skeleton to mechanical loading and consequently maintenance of adequate safety factors and the ability to resist fracture under continued mechanical loading. While I never worked in Dr. Koehl’s lab and we never collaborated in our research, her foundational classroom lessons helped inspire me to pursue a life-long career in comparative skeletal biomechanics.
