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Anatomy
Wearing shoes can
weaken ankle bones
Michael Marshall
PHOTOALTO/SIGRID OLSSON/GETTY IMAGES
YOUR shoes are changing your
feet. The ankles of people who
habitually wear shoes are different
to those of people who tend to
walk barefoot.
In many industrial societies,
people tend to wear shoes from a
young age. However, many people
around the world often go barefoot,
or wear only very thin footwear.
“We know that there are some
variations in the feet of modern
humans, due to the use of shoes,”
says Rita Sorrentino at the
University of Bologna in Italy.
But most previous findings
relate to the front and middle of
the foot. She and her team have
focused on the ankle instead.
They studied 142 ankle bones
from 11 populations from North
America, Africa and Europe.
These included sandal-wearing
Nguni farmers in southern Africa,
people living in New York and
fossilised bones from Stone Age
hunter-gatherers.
The hunter-gatherers’ ankle
bones were significantly shorter
than those of people living in
modern cities, and there were
other differences in the shape.
“They are mostly related to
footwear-related behaviours
and locomotor behaviours,”
says Sorrentino.
14 | New Scientist | 4 January 2020
People who mostly walk
barefoot have more
flexible ankle bones
The hunter-gatherers walked
barefoot for long distances every
day over natural terrain. Their
ankles were relatively flexible.
In contrast, people who live in
big cities, who wear constrictive
footwear and walk short distances
on flat surfaces like asphalt roads,
had more rigid ankles (American
Journal of Physical Anthropology,
doi.org/dg75).
Changes to ankle bones take
place over the course of a person’s
life, and there is no evidence that
these alterations can be passed
on genetically.
Solid evidence for people
wearing shoes only exists for
the past 10,000 years, says
GETTY
Sorrentino. For instance, a sandal
from a Missouri cave may be
8300 years old. Early shoes were
all fairly soft, such as moccasins
or sandals, so wouldn’t have
restricted the motion of the
ankle much.
It is an open question whether
shoes have disadvantages, but
Sorrentino suspects that the
rigidity of modern shoes causes
our bones to become weaker and
more prone to fracturing. ❚
Genetic modification
Potatoes
engineered to
kill major pest
Michael Le Page
A PROBLEM with pesticides
is that they also kill non-pests.
Now biologists have engineered
potatoes to be lethal to a major
pest but harmless to other
species, no pesticide required.
Ralph Bock of the Max Planck
Institute of Molecular Plant
Physiology in Germany has
genetically modified potatoes
to shut down an important gene
in the Colorado potato beetle.
“I’m quite optimistic that it will
provide an additional weapon to
deal with pest insects,” he says.
The approach uses a method
known as RNA interference, or
gene sequencing. Introducing
double-stranded RNA molecules
into the guts of the beetles
can trigger a cellular defence
mechanism that destroys any
similar single-stranded RNAs in
the cell. This stops a crucial gene
from being able to function, as
single-stranded messenger RNA
is the intermediary that enables
DNA instructions to make the
proteins they encode.
In most animals, including
us, any RNAs in the gut or
bloodstream are quickly
The Colorado
potato beetle
has spread
from the US
to Europe
destroyed. But insects have
been found to absorb double-
stranded RNAs from their guts,
and feeding them these can be
enough to trigger gene silencing
in much of their bodies.
Trials by several groups have
shown that spraying RNAs onto
crops can protect them from
pests while leaving some closely
related insects unharmed. But
producing the vast quantities of
RNAs needed to do this would be
extremely expensive, says Bock.
One solution is to genetically
modify plants to produce
pest-targeting RNAs
themselves, rather than
“I’m optimistic that this
gene silencing will be
a weapon to deal with
these pest insects”
spraying these onto them. But
this is tricky, because long bits of
RNA are best for triggering gene
silencing, and plant cells tend to
chop these up into shorter pieces
that don’t work as well.
In 2015, Bock’s team
overcame this problem by
making plants produce the
RNAs inside chloroplasts, the
cellular compartments used for
photosynthesis. High levels of
long RNAs can accumulate in
the chloroplasts, which he
has now found makes gene
silencing far more effective in
the beetles that eat the plant
(bioRxiv, doi.org/dg8q).
The method is ready to
transfer into any potato variety,
says Bock, and a team in China
is engineering the trait into
commercial varieties for field
trials. “We are testing the other
properties of the potatoes,
including yields and taste,”
says Jiang Zhang of Hubei
University in China, who
worked with Bock on testing
the chloroplast method.
Antje Dietz-Pfeilstetter at
the Institute for Biosafety in
Plant Biotechnology in Germany
doesn’t think this chloroplast
approach raises new safety
issues. But crops should still
be evaluated on a case-by-case
basis, to confirm they don’t
harm non-target species,
she says. ❚