Developmental dynamic of vestigial tooth primordia and possibilities for its experimental influencing

Tooth development in the mouse embryo is an important model of developmental biology for studying not only odontogenesis, but also general organogenesis, and it also has considerable biomedical potential. Tooth shares many developmental features with other epithelial organs whose development initiates from budding of epithelium. The tooth is not only an isolated organ, but it is a part of the organ system - dentition. During dentition development, there is serial initiation of developing teeth. The presumed basic tooth formula in placental mammals comprised three incisors, one canine, four premolars and three molars. Dentition of rodents is already very derived being only formed by one continuously growing incisor and three molars in each dental quadrant. In place of missing teeth between the incisor and molars is a toothless region called diastema. During mouse embryonic development, it is possible to observe the initiation of development of rudimentary tooth primordia in both incisor area and in prospective diastema. In contrast to these morphological findings, the generally accepted assumption is that only the prospective functional incisor and the first molar (M1) develop during initial stages of mouse odontogenesis (ED 11-14) and, consequently, all the molecular signalling events are..