Pågående forskning

Endast tillgänglig på engelska.

A morphogenetic system we have been using is odontogenesis, the repetitive generation and patterning of teeth and tooth-like ornament, which are composed of dentinous tissues and may be attached by bone and cementum, and covered by enamel/enameloid.

Our bony fish ancestors acquired the ability to replace teeth by partly resorbing and then shedding the old teeth, the same process we use to replace our milk teeth. In some, the old tooth bases are not completely resorbed and the remnants are buried in the bone. The resorption of each tooth left a scalloped scar that was embedded in the bone, recording the full tooth replacement history. The relative spatiotemporal mapping of such ontogenetic records allows us to reverse-engineer the sequence of development events from a single adult specimen, even though embryos and growth series are rarely preserved in the fossil record.

Cartilaginous fish cannot produce bony tissues, but invent various types of dentinous tissues. All dentinous tissues, including enameloid, osteodentine, and other cellular dentine, are produced by odontoblasts. Odontoblasts would have the cytoplasmatic processes entrapped by the dentine protein matrix it produces, which are housed in tubules after the matrix is mineralised. We can trace the dentine tubules across different types of dentinous tissues to understand how the odontoblasts migrated and how these versatile cells changed their behavior to produce a different tissue.

As more and more exceptional preserved soft tissues are discovered in the fossil record, we also get the unique opportunity to study other skin appendages and their relationship with the epithelium in the epidermis and the connective tissues in the dermis.