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 in some traits. Sex differences in allometry may likely influence study outcomes in biomedicine.

Laura completed a BSc in Palaeobiology at University College London (UCL) and Masters of Research (MRes) in Biosystematics at Imperial College London, along with postgraduate training at UC Santa Barbara, US. She moved to Switzerland to complete her PhD in Natural Sciences at the University of Zurich (Faculty of Math & Science Prize), which was followed by a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Kyoto University in Japan, before moving to Australia, where she worked as a Swiss (SNF) Postdoctoral Fellow, ARC DECRA Fellow and then Senior Lecturer at UNSW. She is currently an ARC Future Fellow at ANU, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Training Centre for Multiscale 3D Imaging, Modelling and Manufacturing. She has undertaken research at over 35 natural history museums worldwide and has participated in fieldwork in Europe, South America, Africa and Australia. She was nominated for the Australian Academy of Sciences Dorothy Hill Medal in 2018 and has received over $7m of funding for her research to date.

Laura’s research interests are focused on how the process of development has shaped morphological evolution on different time scales in mammals. She works in the fields of evolutionary biology and biological anthropology, united through the application of statistical shape analysis and 3D modelling of hard and soft tissues to address questions that relate to adaptation, ecology and function.

Thanks to my co-authors: Shinichi Nakagawa and Losia Lagisz (UNSW), Susanne Zajitschek (Liverpool John Moores), Hamed Haselimashhadi (European Bioinformatics Institute), Jeremy Masion (Melio Healthcare)

Funding by the Australian Research Council, European Molecular Biology Laboratory core funding and the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health