Feeding patterns and bone response in the jaw: Models for understanding primate morphology

动物骨骼的形状与其行为和饮食有关，这种关系使科学家能够根据其化石骨骼提取有关灭绝物种生物学和生态学的线索。然而，这种形式-功能关系的复杂性尚未完全理解。该项目将模拟广泛的进食模式，如在野生灵长类动物中发现的进食模式，以更好地了解进食，机械食物特性和颌骨形状之间的关系。这些发现将为骨骼生物学和进化的适应性场景提供信息，包括灵长类动物和我们自己的人类谱系。这项研究将促进研究和教育的跨学科方法，并涉及STEM领域代表性不足的群体的成员。它将使博士后研究员，研究生和本科生以及当地的STEM教师和学生受益，所有人都将参加实验室学徒，科学演示以及与公众和当地机构的联系。对社会的另一个好处包括为下一代学术研究人员和教育工作者开发一个新的培训环境。进一步了解骨骼如何响应外部负荷模式也是至关重要的硬组织生长和手术干预后的维护，并开发治疗，以对抗骨质疏松性骨loss.The饮食相关的负荷模式的变化的生态形态学的重要性是灵长类动物生物学和进化的关键问题。虽然颌骨比例通常用于推断摄食生态学，但饮食和表型多样性之间的种间联系是可变的，这给精确的化石重建带来了问题。 该项目将量化的长期影响的日常饮食模式的变化对颌骨的生长和功能的饮食负荷与灵长类动物的重要相似性的自然哺乳动物模型。 研究者将评估饱和反应是否存在于一个以上的骨骼结构水平，以及这种变化如何成为骨骼性能的基础。当骨细胞在长时间的负荷过程中变得脱敏时，就会发生“饱和反应”，这反过来会抑制硬组织的形成，尽管常规的机械刺激持续存在。 摄食活动的日常模式的时间变化可能代表诱导口腔中的饱和反应的生态因素。由于运动活动部分取决于喂养方式的模式，这项研究也可以确定整个骨架的成骨刺激和解剖学协变的生态相关性，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

The shape of an animal's skeleton is related to aspects of its behavior and diet, and this relationship allows scientists to extract clues about the biology and ecology of extinct species based on their fossilized bones. However, the complexities of such form-function relationships are not fully understood. This project will model a wide range of feeding patterns like those found in wild primates to better understand the relationship among feeding, mechanical food properties, and jaw form. The findings will inform adaptive scenarios about skeletal biology and evolution, including in primates and our own human lineage. This study will foster interdisciplinary approaches to research and education and involve members of under-represented groups in STEM fields. It will benefit a postdoctoral fellow, graduate students and undergraduates as well as local STEM teachers and students, all of whom will participate in lab apprenticeships, scientific presentations and outreach to the public and local institutions. Another benefit to society includes development of a novel training environment for the next generation of academic researchers and educators. Advancing knowledge about how the skeleton responds external loading patterns is also critical for hard-tissue growth and maintenance after surgical intervention, and for developing therapies to counter osteoporotic bone loss.The ecomorphological importance of variation in diet-related loading patterns is a key issue in primate biology and evolution. Although jaw proportions are commonly used to infer feeding ecology, the interspecific link between diet and phenotypic diversity is variable, which poses a problem for accurate fossil reconstructions. This project will quantify the long-term effects of variation in the modality of daily feeding patterns on jaw growth and function in a naturalistic mammalian model of dietary loading with important similarities to primates. The investigators will assess if a saturation response is resident at more than one level of skeletal architecture and how such variation underlies skeletal performance. The "saturation response" occurs when bone cells become desensitized during protracted loading, which in turn inhibits hard-tissue formation despite the continued presence of routine mechanical stimuli. Temporal variation in daily patterns of feeding activity is likely to represent an ecological factor that induces the saturation response in the oral cavity. As locomotor activity is in part dictated by patterns of feeding modality, this study may also identify the ecological correlates of osteogenic stimuli and anatomical covariation throughout the skeleton.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.