Meeting Abstract
During postembryonic development, organismal form changes as parts grow and differentiate. The relative size and shape achieved by body parts is regulated by the tissue specific mechanisms of growth in response to systemic endocrine signals. Intuitively, nutrition ought to play an essential role in relative growth via insulin signaling. However, how variation in nutrition translates to variation in growth and scaling remains understudied. The aim of this study was to obtain insight into how the protein content of an animal’s diet affects the growth of body parts and adult scaling relationships. We use an extensive ontogenetic dataset of the growth of bones in rats where littermates were fed either a control diet or a low protein diet. We explore how protein deficiency affects ontogenetic relationships between long bones and cranial bones by fitting of a novel Gompertz allometry equation. Protein content greatly diminishes the rate of growth in all parts, resulting in a change in adult allometry. Further, we demonstrate that when protein is limited, some developing parts compete for available nutrients. This effectively reduces the amount of variation in skeletal growth, suggesting that nutrition can act as a buffer to mask genetic variation in growth.
