Refusing to Fuse

Our skull may look and feel solid but it's actually made up of 28 separate bones that fuse together during development. Having multiple junctions allows the skull to squeeze through the birth canal and then keep up with rapid brain growth. If this process is not perfectly orchestrated, however, children can be born with serious deformations. Cleft palates, which affect one in 700 newborns, are a case in point, caused when the two arch-like plates in the roof of their mouth fail to come together in the womb. Left with a hole in their palate, children can develop speech and feeding problems. The central pin-shaped blue region shows this gap in the skull of a mouse lacking a specific protein implicated in palate formation. In healthy animals with this protein, this space does not exist as the surrounding bones (coloured in pink) close in and fuse together before birth.

Written by Jan Piotrowski

Jan Piotrowski

Writer

A recent Imperial College graduate with a Masters in Science Communication, Jan now works as a freelance science communicator. His interests focus on neuroscience, psychology and the environment.

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• Image by Juhee Jeong and colleagues
• New York University College of Dentistry, USA
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 2.0)
• Research published in BMC Developmental Biology, August 2014