Professor Mehran Moazen et al to lead significant international research into burrowing animals

Professor Mehran Moazen, together with Professor Susan Evans and Dr Sara Abad-Guaman, will be leading a project funded by a three-year Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) award worth $1.5m. The project will be an international collaboration between the UCL Centre for Integrative Anatomy labs - comprising scientists from the UCL Research Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Cell and Developmental Biology, on one hand, and the labs of Professor Dominique Adriaens (Ghent University, Belgium), Professor Henrik Birkedal (Aarhus University, Denmark) and Professor Tiana Kohlsdorf (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil) on the other.  

Head-first burrowing is a specialized locomotory behaviour in vertebrates, and is least understood compared to (for example) flying and swimming.  Understanding how they successfully manage this rather extraordinary task is the main focus of this project, with reference to a specific group of head-first burrowers called 'amphisbaenians'.  Amphisbaenians generally look a bit like snakes, but are in fact specialised lizards having four distinctly different head shapes (characterised as shovel, spade, keel or round, as can be seen in the pictures below). These differing shapes are thought to reflect the animals' burrowing methods, but there may be other driving factors that we still do not know about.  The project team wants to increase understanding of how small, mainly limbless, animals having head sizes of less than 10mm can build tunnels through different soils and/or navigate their way forward. The puzzle arises because, in doing so, these animals need to apply forces much greater than their body weight, and - to do so without damaging themselves - their heads have evolved to distinct morphologies (shapes). 

The four labs that make up the interdisciplinary and international team assembled here will decode to an unprecedented level the musculoskeletal system of amphisbaenians, using a range of advanced techniques:

(1) the Moazen/C4IA lab will characterise the mechanics of the animals' skull bones and joints, and how they interact with various soils.  To do this, the researchers will use computed tomography (CT), image processing & computer simulations;

(2) the Kohlsdorf lab will measure the forces acting on the animals' skulls using real-life measurements, and unravel their genomes to understand how genetically similar (or not) they are to one another;

(3) the Birkedal lab will examine the chemical composition and nanostructure of the skull tissues of these animals, and explore potential links with their genetics and overall shape and size; and

(4) the Adriaens lab will investigate the role of muscles and sensory organs within the animals' skin, and their movement in different soils.

This project will unravel how an understudied group of reptiles function and produce unexpected levels of force. Its findings can help scientists from several fields: 

• tissue engineers can be informed about the interplay between forces, function, and gene expression that can lead to novel tissue engineering/regeneration approaches;
• robotics engineers can be facilitated to develop miniaturised robots for various applications such biomedical engineering or excavation; and, most importantly,
• the next generation of scientists will be left with examples of how to learn from nature and translate this knowledge into applications useful for mankind.

The HFSP promotes this type of international collaboration in basic research focused on the elucidation of the sophisticated and complex mechanisms of living organisms.  The application that led to this significant financial award was among the 25 highest-scoring applications that were selected from 65 full proposals offered to HFSP's Research Grants Program (from an initial total of 669 letters of intent). This project was selected after a rigorous, multi-stage review process by internationally highly-acclaimed scientists plus HFSPO's independent and international Review Committee.  As the HFSP website states, "Participation of scientists from disciplines outside the traditional life sciences such as biophysics, chemistry, computational biology, computer science, engineering, mathematics, nanoscience or physics is recommended because such collaborations have opened up new approaches for understanding the complex structures and regulatory networks that characterize living organisms, their evolution and interactions.  Research grants are provided for teams of scientists who are based in different countries and wish to combine their expertise in innovative approaches to questions that could not be answered by individual laboratories. Preliminary results are not required and applicants are expected to develop new lines of research through the research collaboration."