Mapping human long bone compartmentalisation during ontogeny: A new methodological approach

Throughout ontogeny, human bones undergo differentiation in terms of shape, size and tissue type; this is a complex scenario in which the variations in the tissue compartmentalisation of the cortical bone are still poorly understood. Currently, compartmentalisation is studied using methodologies that oversimplify the bone tissue complexity. Here, we present a new methodological approach that integrates a histological description and a mineral content analysis to study the compartmentalisation of the whole mineralised and non-mineralised tissues (i.e., spatial distribution in long bone sections). This new methodology, based on Geographical Information System (GIS) software, allows us to draw areas of interest (i.e., tracing vectorial shapes which are quantifiable) in raw images that are extracted from microscope and compared them spatially in a semi-automatic and quantitative fashion. As an example of our methodology, we have studied the tibiae from individuals with different age at death (infant, juvenile and adult). The tibia’s cortical bone presents a well-formed fibrolamellar bone, in which remodelling is clearly evidenced from early ontogeny, and we discuss the existence of “lines of arrested growth”. Concurrent with the histological variation, Raman and FT-IR spectroscopy analyses corroborate that the mineral content in the cortical bone changes differentially. The anterior portion of the tibia remains highly pierced and is less crystalline than the rest of the cortex during growth, which is evidence of more active and continuous remodelling. Finally, while porosity and other “non-mineralised cavities” are largely modified, the mineralised portion and the marrow cavity size persist proportionally during ontogeny.