Crossed Skull Bones

Your skull is formed not of one single smooth bone, but 22 tessellating plates like a 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Where they intersect, sections are joined by sutures which allow the skull to expand as a baby grows. When children are born with craniosynostosis or other birth defects, these sutures are absent and repeated invasive operations are needed to allow skull expansion. To understand why slight genetic irregularities cause such significant problems, researchers painstakingly analysed a growing mouse suture cell by cell to generate an atlas of development. They found 14 types of cell involved, and identified new genes linked to producing stem cells (starter cells, green in the suture pictured soon after birth) between the two bones (purple). Mice with craniosynostosis also showed unusually symmetrical distribution of these stem cells, which mismanaged the bone alignment. Revealing these developmental details may lead to less invasive, or even preventative, treatments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by D’Juan T. Farmer and colleagues
• Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, August 2021