Hen's teeth with enamel cap: from dream to impossibility.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The ability to form teeth was lost in an ancestor of all modern birds, approximately 100-80 million years ago. However, experiments in chicken have revealed that the oral epithelium can respond to inductive signals from mouse mesenchyme, leading to reactivation of the odontogenic pathway. Recently, tooth germs similar to crocodile rudimentary teeth were found in a chicken mutant. These "chicken teeth" did not develop further, but the question remains whether functional teeth with enamel cap would have been obtained if the experiments had been carried out over a longer time period or if the chicken mutants had survived. The next odontogenetic step would have been tooth differentiation, involving deposition of dental proteins.

Results

Using bioinformatics, we assess

SUBMITTER: Sire JY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2542379 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature