Bone Response to Mechanical Loading is Highly Heritable and Correlates with Osteocyte Lacunar Morphology in Genetically Diverse Mouse Strains

Bone response to tibial mechanical loading is highly heritable in Diversity Outbred and founder inbred mice, with periosteal formation heritability near or above 80%.

• Why it matters: Most loading studies use a limited set of inbred strains, leaving uncertainty about how genetic background shapes mechanoresponsiveness and which traits track with it.
• What they did: Using in vivo tibial loading in DO mice and eight founder inbred strains, they quantified loading-induced periosteal bone formation and bone volumes, then assessed heritability and osteocyte lacunar morphology correlations across strains.
• The result: Osteocyte lacunar morphology correlates with loading response across inbred strains, and 129S1 shows the most elongated lacunae and the highest periosteal and endocortical response magnitude.

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