COMPLEX ARCHITECTURE OF THE OSTEOCYTE LACUNAR-CANALICULAR NETWORK IN MICE

Abstract

International audienceThe osteocyte network in bone has attracted great interest due to the role of osteocytes in mechanosensing and regulation of bone remodeling. Osteocytes reside in lacunae and are interconnected by cellular processes running through a network of canaliculi; canals roughly 200 nm in diameter. The canalicular network plays a vital role in the communication between osteocytes and facilitates a way for osteocytes to orchestrate bone remodelling. Rodents are widely used as model organisms to study experimentally induced effects in bone. Human and rodent bone does, however, display large structural variations with the largest difference being the absence of harversian remodeling in rodents, which has profound implications for bone microstructure [1]. Here we have studied the lacuna-canalicular network in mouse bone to describe the communication network and the structural features found on the sub-micro meter length scale. Describing the hierarchical structure of bone demands multiscale imaging techniques [2-4] and advances in high resolution X-ray imaging has paved the way for characterization of the lacunar-canalicular network [5-7] Herein we apply X-ray holotomography with a 25 nm voxel size to mouse bone