The topobiology of chemical elements in seabird feathers
Howell, Nicholas R., Lavers, Jennifer L., Uematsu, Sayaka, Paterson, David, Howard, Daryl L., Spiers, Kathryn, De Jonge, Martin D., Hanley, Tracey, Garrett, Richard, and Banati, Richard B. (2017) The topobiology of chemical elements in seabird feathers. Scientific Reports, 7 (1).
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Abstract
The highly organized morphogenesis of bird feathers holds important phylo- and ontogenetic information on the evolution of birds, organogenesis, tissue regeneration, and the health status of individual animals. Altered topobiological patterns are regularly used as retrospective evidence for disturbed developmental trajectories due to the past exposure to environmental stressors. Using the most advanced high-resolution (5-70 μm) X-ray fluorescence microscopy (XFM), we describe in the feathers from three species of Procellariiformes hitherto unknown, depositions of elements (Zn, Ca, Br, Cu, Fe) that are independent of pigmentation or any underlying variation in density or polymer structure. In the case of Zn, the pattern across several species of Procellariiformes, but not other species, consisted of highly regular bands of Zn numbering 30-32, which may reflect the estimated number of days of active feather growth or the duration of the moult period. Thus, speculatively, the highly consistent Zn pattern might be the result of a so far unknown diurnal systemic regulation rather than local heterogeneity amongst the follicular stem cells.
| Item ID: | 54160 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 2045-2322 |
| Additional Information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Funders: | Australian Synchrotron, ANSTO-Monash Collaboration, Trading Consultants Ltd, W.V. Scott Charitable Trust, WWF Japan, NRDA Asia |
| Date Deposited: | 19 Jun 2018 03:53 |
| FoR Codes: | 34 CHEMICAL SCIENCES > 3404 Medicinal and biomolecular chemistry > 340404 Cheminformatics and quantitative structure-activity relationships @ 20% 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3109 Zoology > 310908 Animal physiology - biophysics @ 20% 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3109 Zoology > 310911 Animal structure and function @ 60% |
| SEO Codes: | 97 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 970106 Expanding Knowledge in the Biological Sciences @ 100% |
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