The year was c.700 BC. King Hezekiah scrambled to prepare his city for a siege. But there was a problem. The Gihon spring that provided water to the hill-top city was outside the city walls, so Hezekiah devised a last-ditch plan: dig a tunnel to direct the water into the city. With time slipping away, workers dug from both ends, hoping to meet in the middle. Despite a few changes of direction, the engineers were successful; the pool filled with water, and the city successfully held off the siege. This blind tunneling through rock, from both ends, meeting in the middle, occurs more than a trillion times in each human skeleton in the osteocyte lacunar-canalicular network. But how do osteocytes accomplish this feat? In this talk, we’ll explore the mechanisms by which osteocytes dig these tunnels, and what this might mean for bone health and disease.
