Associate Professor Laura Wilson 
Senior Lecturer & Head of Discipline - Biological Anthropology

Title: Sex differences in allometry for phenotypic traits

 

Abstract: Sex differences in the lifetime risk and expression of disease are well-known. Preclinical research targeted at improving treatment, increasing health span, and reducing the financial burden of health care, has mostly been conducted on male animals and cells. The extent to which sex differences in phenotypic traits are explained by sex differences in body weight remains unclear. Using the preclinical mouse model, we quantify and meta-analyse sex differences in the allometric relationship between trait value and body weight for 363 phenotypic traits in male and female, recorded in over 2 million measurements from the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium. We find that differences in body weight are not sufficient to explain sex differences in trait values, but scaling differences are common and body weight scaling may be helpful for understanding variation in some traits. Sex differences in allometry may likely influence study outcomes in biomedicine.