ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Biomechanics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1639788
This article is part of the Research TopicBiomechanics regulators of musculoskeletal growthView all 3 articles
Mechanical Deformations of Bone Generate Interstitial Fluid Flow at Nanoscale Velocities Around Osteocytes
Provisionally accepted- The City College of New York, New York, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Osteocytes play a critical role in bone mechanobiology, sensing and responding to mechanical loading through fluid flow within the lacunar-canalicular network (LCN). Experimental measurements of interstitial fluid flow in bone are difficult due to the embedded nature of osteocytes in the dense mineralized matrix. Therefore, accurate computer simulations of these processes are essential for understanding bone mechanobiology. Two computational approaches have mostly been used to characterize convective interstitial fluid flow in bone: poroelastic finite element (FE) models, which treat bone as a homogenized porous medium, and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) models, which incorporate explicit LCN microarchitecture. However, these approaches have predicted fluid velocity that differ by three to four orders of magnitude. Here, we investigated the reasons for this discrepancy and demonstrate how imposed pressure gradients influence the predicted fluid velocities. Using an FSI model of a single osteocyte embedded in mineralized matrix, we show that when an imposed pore pressure gradient is smaller than that generated by bone matrix deformation under mechanical loading, the convective fluid velocities in the canaliculi reach ~100 nm/s and scale with the applied strain. In contrast, applying higher pressure gradients decouples fluid flow from the solid bone matrix deformation, resulting in fluid velocities bigger than 100 µm/s that are insensitive to loading conditions. Future studies investigating the effect of load-induced convection flow on osteocyte mechanobiology should therefore apply small imposed pressure gradients to avoid overestimating interstitial flow and more realistically capture load-induced convective flow.
Keywords: Osteocyte, Lacuna, Canaliculus, Dendrite, Interstitial fluid flow, Convection, mechanical loading, Fluid-structure interactions
Received: 02 Jun 2025; Accepted: 04 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Munoz, De Paolis, Cardoso and Carriero. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Alessandra Carriero, The City College of New York, New York, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.