Bone fusion in normal and pathological development is constrained by the network architecture of the human skull
The premature fusion of cranial bones, craniosynostosis, affects the correct development of the skull producing morphological malformations in newborns. To assess the susceptibility of each craniofacial articulation to close prematurely, we used a network model of the skull to quantify the link reliability (an index based on stochastic block modeling and Bayesian inference) of each articulation. We show that, of the 93 human skull articulations at birth, the few articulations that are associated with nonsyndromic craniosynostosis conditions have statistically significant lower reliability scores than the others. In a similar way, articulations that close during the normal postnatal development of the skull have also lower reliability scores than those articulations that persist through adult live. These results indicate a relationship between the architecture of the skull network and the specific articulations that close during normal development and in pathological conditions. Our findings suggest that the topological arrangement of skull bones might act as an epigenetic factor, predisposing some articulations to closure, both in normal and pathological development, and also affecting the long-term evolution of the skull.