Early tooth development of Tabby mice

The developing mouse dentition is a very useful tool to study molecular regulation of odontogenesis and also organogenesis. The embryonic mouse dentition comprises developing functional tooth primordia as well as rudimentary tooth primordia. These rudiments arrest their growth during development and either degenerate or become a part of a functional tooth. Mice with gene defects also allow elucidation of a function of genes, their products and signalling pathways. The protein ectodysplasin is essential for development of ectodermal derivatives - skin, hair, glands and teeth. The Tabby mice have a mutation in the Eda gene, which encodes the protein ectodysplasin, and they display a number of dentition anomalies. Early development of the lower jaw dentition in Tabby embryos has been already morphologically described. As a prerequisite for understanding regulatory mechanisms of odontogenesis in Tabby mice, it is also necessary to map the spatiotemporal dynamics of signalling centres that express Shh in both the rudimentary and functional tooth primordia. The aim of this thesis was to compare the signalling centres based on the Shh expression and its spatiotemporal dynamics in the lower jaw of Tabby and WT mouse embryos. Then the Shh data were correlated with known morphological data to clarify the..