PhD Studentships |
Current Scholarships
Biomechanical constraints on the anatomy of limb muscles
Supervisors: Dr John Hutchinson (RVC, jrhutch@rvc.ac.uk), Prof Alan Wilson (RVC) and Dr Lei Ren (Kings College London)
Department: Veterinary Basic Sciences
Muscles should need to be long-fibred and potentially massive to handle the constraints of a large range-of-motion and a poor mechanical advantage during the sit-to-stand transition. But how much capacity for length change do they require in different species with different behaviours? We seek a student (engineering/biomechanics/anatomy background) to forge a new research area on the comparative biomechanics of the sit-to-stand transition in animals. The project involves a rigorous, multidisciplinary integration of anatomical (including laser diffraction measurements of sarcomere lengths), experimental (including non-invasive measurements with force platforms, electromyography, and ultrasound), and computational (featuring 3D anatomically-realistic biomechanical simulations) methods. Dissections and imaging will be used to build computer models that reproduce experimental measurements of animals standing up, allowing us to estimate how demanding these behaviours are for parts of the musculoskeletal system.
We aim to determine how muscles and tendons are used to lift the centre of mass during standing up and how this mechanism varies among species of different sizes and postures (bipedal: chickens, humans, ostriches; quadrupedal: greyhounds, horses and elephants). We predict that standing up will place muscle fascicles near similar limits of length change as well as strength (safety factors or ratio of failure to functional stresses), which would indicate that animals facing problems standing up may suffer from a low strength:weight ratio caused by poor mechanical advantage or limited range of motion. This is an area of comparative biomechanics that is almost totally unstudied and hence a ripe opportunity for a student to forge a novel niche for their research career, as well as a question of basic science that has manifold future clinical applications in cases where animals have difficulties standing up or doing other large range-of-motion activities.
References:
- Burkholder TJ, Lieber RL. (2001) Sarcomere length operating range of vertebrate muscles during movement. J Exp Biol 204:1529-1536.
- Pandy MG, Garner BA, Anderson FC (1995) Optimal control of non-ballistic muscular movements: a constraint-based performance criterion for rising from a chair. J Biomech Eng 117:15-25
- Fukunaga T, Kubo K, Kawakami Y, Fukashiro S, Kanehisa H, Maganaris CN. (2001) In vivo behaviour of human muscle tendon during walking. Proc Roy Soc B 268:229-233
The deadline for applications is Friday 12th February 2010.
Interview Dates:
Friday 12th March 2010 (Hawkshead Campus)
Tuesday 16th March 2010 (Camden Campus).
See the main Studentships page for application details and further information.