Popowics Tracy, Mulimani Priti
Department of Oral Health Sciences, University of Washington School of Dentistry, Seattle, WA, United States.
Front Dent Med. 2023 Apr 26;4:1158482. doi: 10.3389/fdmed.2023.1158482. eCollection 2023.
The discovery of odontogenic mechanisms essential for regenerating dental tissues and eventually developing a biomimetic artificial whole tooth for replacement is an ongoing aspiration for dental clinicians and researchers. Studying the diversity, development and evolutionary changes of mammalian dentitions can provide key insights into the mechanisms of odontogenesis that can be harnessed for regenerative dental medicine. A myriad of influences is expected to have shaped the dentitions of mammals and our objective is to highlight the contributions of phylogeny, functional adaptation, and development to tooth shape. Innovations in tooth shape analysis will be discussed, such as in imaging methodologies and quantitative comparisons, molecular biology approaches to phylogeny and the ontogenetic basis of tooth form. Study of the inter- and intra-species differences in tooth form as well as dental anomalies has provided clues toward the mechanisms of evolutionary change in dental form. Thus, phenotypic variation in tooth shape will also be discussed, including the role of development in creating tooth shape differences that evolutionary selection pressures may act upon. Functional adaptations have occurred in the context of the phylogenetic signal of primitive mammals, and predecessors to each phylogenetic branch, and examples will be discussed within members of the Order Carnivora, the Superfamily Suoidea and the Order Primates. The comparative study of mammalian tooth shape holds the potential to inform dental research areas, such as etiopathogeneses of dental variation and tooth shape anomalies, molecular mechanisms of tooth development and functional issues. Ultimately, insights from these research areas can be potentially translated for futuristic clinical applications like regeneration of various tooth tissue layers and eventually full tooth replacement.
发现对于再生牙组织并最终开发用于替换的仿生人工全牙至关重要的牙源性机制，一直是牙科临床医生和研究人员的追求。研究哺乳动物牙列的多样性、发育和进化变化，可以为牙发生机制提供关键见解，这些机制可用于再生牙科医学。预计众多影响因素塑造了哺乳动物的牙列，我们的目标是强调系统发育、功能适应和发育对牙齿形状的贡献。将讨论牙齿形状分析的创新，例如成像方法和定量比较、系统发育的分子生物学方法以及牙齿形态的个体发生基础。对牙齿形态的种间和种内差异以及牙齿异常的研究，为牙齿形态进化变化的机制提供了线索。因此，还将讨论牙齿形状的表型变异，包括发育在产生牙齿形状差异方面的作用，而进化选择压力可能作用于这些差异。功能适应发生在原始哺乳动物的系统发育信号以及每个系统发育分支的前身的背景下，将在食肉目、猪形超科和灵长目成员中讨论相关例子。对哺乳动物牙齿形状的比较研究有可能为牙科研究领域提供信息，如牙齿变异和牙齿形状异常的病因学、牙齿发育的分子机制以及功能问题。最终，这些研究领域的见解有可能转化为未来的临床应用，如各种牙组织层的再生以及最终的全牙替换。
