0000000000042548
AUTHOR
Borja Esteve-altava
showing 12 related works from this author
Reconstruction of the internal structure of the pore system of a complex dinosaur eggshell (Megaloolithus siruguei)
2013
Despite the many reconstructions of fossil material that have recently appeared in the literature, dinosaur eggshells have never been reconstructed using computing techniques. Using the EMAC 3-D modelling methodology, we reconstruct a section of the Late Cretaceous Megaloolithus siruguei eggshell, which has a particularly complex pore system, exhibiting an intricate network of vertical, oblique, and horizontal pores.
Anatomical Network Comparison of Human Upper and Lower, Newborn and Adult, and Normal and Abnormal Limbs, with Notes on Development, Pathology and Li…
2015
How do the various anatomical parts (modules) of the animal body evolve into very different integrated forms (integration) yet still function properly without decreasing the individual’s survival? This long-standing question remains unanswered for multiple reasons, including lack of consensus about conceptual definitions and approaches, as well as a reasonable bias toward the study of hard tissues over soft tissues. A major difficulty concerns the non-trivial technical hurdles of addressing this problem, specifically the lack of quantitative tools to quantify and compare variation across multiple disparate anatomical parts and tissue types. In this paper we apply for the first time a powerf…
Anatomical networks reveal the musculoskeletal modularity of the human head
2015
AbstractMosaic evolution is a key mechanism that promotes robustness and evolvability in living beings. For the human head, to have a modular organization would imply that each phenotypic module could grow and function semi-independently. Delimiting the boundaries of head modules and even assessing their existence, is essential to understand human evolution. Here we provide the first study of the human head using anatomical network analysis (AnNA), offering the most complete overview of the modularity of the head to date. Our analysis integrates the many biological dependences that tie hard and soft tissues together, arising as a consequence of development, growth, stresses and loads and mo…
The multiple directions of evolutionary change.
2008
The theory of Punctuated Equilibria challenges the neo-Darwinian tenet that evolution is a uniform process. Recently, an article by Hunt1 has found that directional change during the evolution of a lineage is relatively small (occurring only in 5% of 250 analyzed traits). Of those traits that were shown to follow a trend, size was more likely to show gradual changes, whereas shape changes were more random. Here, we provide a short view of the nature of evolutionary trends, showing that directional change within lineages and among clades provides valuable evolutionary information about the processes involved in their generation. BioEssays 30:521–525, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Beyond the functional matrix hypothesis: a network null model of human skull growth for the formation of bone articulations.
2014
Craniofacial sutures and synchondroses form the boundaries among bones in the human skull, providing functional, developmental and evolutionary information. Bone articulations in the skull arise due to interactions between genetic regulatory mechanisms and epigenetic factors such as functional matrices (soft tissues and cranial cavities), which mediate bone growth. These matrices are largely acknowledged for their influence on shaping the bones of the skull; however, it is not fully understood to what extent functional matrices mediate the formation of bone articulations. Aiming to identify whether or not functional matrices are key developmental factors guiding the formation of bone articu…
Networking Brains: Modeling Spatial Relationships of the Cerebral Cortex
2017
Brain mapping has always been a priority in neurobiology and evolutionary neuroanatomy. In the last century, methodological issues and technical advances have generated a vivid debate on the parcellation and functions of the cortical territories. Brain structure is generally analyzed by considering the network of connections associated with neural pathways. Nonetheless, there is still a major debate on the recognition of the spatial and geometrical components of the cerebral cortex. The maps produced by Korbinian Brodmann in the early twentieth century on the basis of histological patterns represented a pioneering and decisive step in this sense, being a reference until the present day. Net…
Anatomical Network Analysis of Primate Skull Morphology
2015
Borja Esteve-Altava1,3, Julia Boughner2, Rui Diogo3 and Diego Rasskin-Gutman1. 1Theoretical Biology Research Group, Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity & Evolutionary Biology, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain. 2Anatomy & Cell Biology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. 3Anatomy, Howard University, Washington, DC USA. boresal@gmail.com, diego.rasskin@uv.es, julia.boughner@gmail.com, rui.diogo@howard.edu
Disconnecting bones within the jaw-otic network modules underlies mammalian middle ear evolution
2019
The origin of the mammalian middle ear ossicles from the craniomandibular articulation of their synapsid ancestors is a key event in the evolution of vertebrates. The richness of the fossil record and the multitude of developmental studies have provided a stepwise reconstruction of this evolutionary innovation, highlighting the homology between the quadrate, articular, pre-articular and angular bones of early synapsids with the incus, malleus, gonial and ectotympanic bones of derived mammals, respectively. There are several aspects involved in this functional exaptation: (i) an increase of the masticatory musculature; (ii) the separation of the quadrate bone from the cranium; and (iii) the …
Grist for Riedl's mill: A network model perspective on the integration and modularity of the human skull
2013
This research project was supported by Grant BFU2008‐00643 to D.R.G. from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion as well as project CGL2012‐37279 to M.B., from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad.
Anatomical Network Analysis Shows Decoupling of Modular Lability and Complexity in the Evolution of the Primate Skull
2015
Modularity and complexity go hand in hand in the evolution of the skull of primates. Because analyses of these two parameters often use different approaches, we do not know yet how modularity evolves within, or as a consequence of, an also-evolving complex organization. Here we use a novel network theory-based approach (Anatomical Network Analysis) to assess how the organization of skull bones constrains the co-evolution of modularity and complexity among primates. We used the pattern of bone contacts modeled as networks to identify connectivity modules and quantify morphological complexity. We analyzed whether modularity and complexity evolved coordinately in the skull of primates. Specifi…
Bone Fusion in Normal and Pathological Development is Constrained by the Network Architecture of the Human Skull
2016
The premature fusion of cranial bones, craniosynostosis, affects the correct development of the skull producing morphological malformations in newborns. To assess the susceptibility of each craniofacial articulation to close prematurely, we used a network model of the skull to quantify the link reliability (an index based on stochastic block modeling and Bayesian inference) of each articulation. We show that, of the 93 human skull articulations at birth, the few articulations that are associated with nonsyndromic craniosynostosis conditions have statistically significant lower reliability scores than the others. In a similar way, articulations that close during the normal postnatal developm…
Theoretical morphology of tetrapod skull networks
2014
Abstract Network models of the tetrapod skull in which nodes represent bones and links represent sutures have recently offered new insights into the structural constraints underlying the evolutionary reduction of bone number in the tetrapod skull, known as Williston's Law. Here, we have built null network model-derived generative morphospaces of the tetrapod skull using random, preferential attachment, and geometric proximity growth rules. Our results indicate that geometric proximity is the best null model to explain the disparity of skull structures under two structural constraints: bilateral symmetry and presence of unpaired bones. The analysis of the temporal occupation of this morphosp…