A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement scores more than three thousand resorption cavities on forty slices of one bovine femur and finds their shape follows the depth at which each slice was cut.
Forty slices from a single femur, cut at five known depths, show the cells that resorb bone working differently from the outside in
Ms Edda Nwafor, Doctoral Candidate in the School of Continuous Improvement, has spent the better part of a teaching period at a microscope with a tally counter, and the University is now in a position to say what she was counting. Pits and Trenches on Forty Bone Slices: Osteoclast resorption cavity shape mapped against where in one bovine femur each slice was cut is a research poster by Ms Nwafor with Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, and Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter.
Forty slices is not very many until you have sat with each of them for a week. I am grateful to the bone for holding still, and to the bench for being there every morning.
— Ms Edda Nwafor, Doctoral Candidate, School of Continuous Improvement
Behind the count sits a single block of bone, a saw, and a record of how far in from the surface each cut was made. The cells that take bone apart leave either round pits or long trenches, and the poster reports 3,214 of these marks across five depths: trenches made up 18 per cent of the cavities on the outermost slices and 47 per cent on the innermost, with the cells themselves held to one preparation throughout. The team has since adopted the practice of noting the depth of every slice it cuts.
The School regards a candidature that begins by asking where its own materials came from as one that has begun in the right place. Dr Solberg said the poster “gives the School a bench it did not know it had, and a reason to keep it tidy”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.o62s5r.