Genetics, development of human foot bones (with links to brain development)
Hi, I am a recent biology graduate and former medical research lab intern who is interested in researching the genetics and development of human foot bones, especially those constituting the medial longitudinal foot arch, which is a derived trait for obligate bipedalism. Also, arch development and pathologies are involved in Down syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities. I'm also interested in exploring these connections. As of right now, I am not in school and do not have access to a lab, so I'm not sure how to get start pursuing research in these areas. Any advice or direction would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
#Comments: 1
Thank you very much for posting this!
That's a very good question. Although experimental work on this would be problematic from several standpoints, there are lots of other non-experimental research approaches one could use to address these kinds of questions.
One approach would be to find open access databases, or large data sets, of anatomical structures from which one could do statistical studies. One could use these to either discover patterns or test hypotheses. For that, I'd start with a Google search for anatomical databases, or look at NCBI, a site maintained by the NIH which has a lot of resources, although most seem to focus on genetics and genomics.
Another approach would be to develop mathematical models based on possible developmental mechanisms. These might be testable either by comparison to existing data sets, or with future experiments. A lot of people get turned off by the word "mathematical," but very simple models can often prove to be quite useful tools, and once one poses the right question, one might be able to find mathematically inclined collaborators.
You mentioned the relation to bipedalism, so you might also try doing phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate hypotheses about foot bone evolution, because those kinds of studies can often be done with existing data. They can involve pretty challenging areas of statistics.
Probably the place to start would be to identify specific questions of interest based on existing literature. You could even do a meta-analysis by pulling together data from existing studies. There are lots of open access journals (e.g. PLoS, and many others), but a lot of this research will be NIH funded, and therefore should be accessible a year after publication (e.g. through PubMed). Lots of other studies can be found indirectly (via author's websites), or are made open access by an otherwise non-open access journal.
Once you've got a specific question and approach in mind, there are a couple of people on this list who might be able to help you go further (one person who does a lot of work with biomechanics of the vertebrate skeleton, one who's done some phylogenetic comparative studies, and one who has a lot of statistics expertise).