Fig. 7. Chrna1 cKO increased femur ductility and toughness in males.

(A to D) Mechanical properties were assessed with load-displacement curves from monotonic loading to failure. There were no differences in female bones. (E to H) Male Chrna cKO mice had increased post–yield deflection and total work to failure, indicating more ductile tissue properties. FTIR was used to evaluate bone compositional properties from a subset of left femora from mice used for mechanical testing for females (I) and males (J). No differences were found between the control and cKO groups. Student t tests were performed with cKO and Cre-negative controls to determine significance (P < 0.05) for each metric. N = 3 to 15 per group and assay. **P ≤ 0.01; ***P ≤ 0.001.