Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Faculty of Medicine
E-mail: cprolian at ucalgary dot ca
My research focuses on the functional morphology, development and evolution of hands and feet in humans and other primates. The limb bones of vertebrates are serially homologous, meaning that they evolved from a genetic duplication event in which part of the genome that controls limb development was duplicated and expressed in a new place during embryonic development. Accordingly, the limb bones, including those in the hands and feet, share most of their genetic "blueprints" in common. This means that serially homologous bones like those in the thumb and great toe may be more strongly correlated with each other than with other parts of the skeleton, even if the bones serve different functions.
The concept that parts of an organism can be more highly correlated than others because of shared developmental pathways (a.k.a. pleiotropy) is known as 'morphological integration'. In primates, this concept has been well documented for the cranium, but is only now beginning to be understood in the postcranium. I'm doing my bit to fill in the gaps by looking at integration in primate hands and feet.
Why should we care if the hands and feet are integrated? At a basic level, documenting covariation in skeletal form is one way of understanding the potentially constraining effects of pleiotropy on morphological evolution. On another level, I'm also interested in this topic because it has clear implications for human evolution...
For example, bipedalism and manipulative ability are two important hallmarks of human evolution. The traditional story goes that in the transition to bipedalism, the upper limb was "emancipated" from locomotor constraints and underwent anatomical modifications for manipulative ability. But what if pleiotropy imposed a constraint on independent variation in the shape and size of hand and foot bones? Maybe selection acting on the toes in the context of bipedalism caused the hand bones to change in a similar way? These are some of the questions I have tried to answer with my dissertation work, using a multidisciplinary approach that includes biomechanics of hand and foot function, morphometrics of hand and foot bones, and limb developmental biology. Check out the links to my projects below to find out more...
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