{"id":25772,"date":"2025-07-27T10:55:16","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T10:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/25772\/"},"modified":"2025-07-27T10:55:16","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T10:55:16","slug":"what-ever-growing-incisors-can-teach-us-about-genetic-disease-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/25772\/","title":{"rendered":"What Ever-Growing Incisors Can Teach Us About Genetic Disease"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teeth may seem like static fixtures, but a new collaboration between engineers and clinicians is proving just how dynamic, informative and medically significant our teeth can be.<\/p>\n

In a recent study<\/a>, published in the American Chemical Society\u2019s ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, engineers and dentists come together to uncover how teeth, as biological material, hold key information for understanding rare craniofacial disorders that develop during childhood. Kyle Vining<\/a>, Assistant Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and in Preventative and Restorative Science at Penn Dental Medicine, leads this interdisciplinary team, which includes Yuchen (Tracy) Jiang, a former master\u2019s student in MSE, Kei Katsura, a pediatric dentist and KL2 postdoctoral research scholar at Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Institute of Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at Penn, and Elizabeth Bhoj<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in Penn Medicine and the Division of Human Genetics at CHOP.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"The research team including (from left to right) Elizabeth Bhoj, Kyle Vining, Kei Katsura, Nir Badt and Yuchen (Tracy) Jiang.<\/p>\n

Through their new methodology and by leveraging unique characteristics of rodent teeth, the team was able to combine materials science, mineralogy and human genetics to map out the properties of enamel and dentin development. Their methods have the potential to provide new insights into identifying and treating both rare craniofacial diseases in children and more common dental cavities.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople often assume that if you understand bone, you understand teeth,\u201d says Vining. \u201cBut that\u2019s not necessarily the case. Teeth have a different composition, require different analytical tools and behave differently during development. What\u2019s exciting is that by using mouse incisors to study enamel formation over time, we do not need to extract baby or adult teeth to understand those characteristics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teeth, Rocks and Cross-Disciplinary Tools<\/p>\n

The project is centered on a deceptively simple question: How do teeth mineralize? Surprisingly, scientists don\u2019t have a full picture of how this essential process unfolds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an exciting step in determining how teeth develop and harden,\u201d says Katsura. \u201cTooth mineralization is such an intricate process with many hidden secrets we get to uncover. Although we still don\u2019t fully understand how teeth mineralize, our long-term hope is to apply this knowledge to the clinic, helping people who are more susceptible to dental cavities, specifically those with rare genetic syndromes.\u201d<\/p>\n

To answer this question, researchers borrowed a surprising tool from geology: the nanoindenter, a device traditionally used to test the hardness of rocks. Now, instead of probing granite or sandstone, the team uses it to analyze tiny sections of tooth enamel, but it wasn\u2019t a straightforward task.<\/p>\n

\u201cSample preparation was one of the most challenging parts,\u201d says Jaing, the lead author on the paper. \u201cTooth is such a hard and heterogeneous material. It\u2019s layered, shifting and biological. Embedding it properly for testing took a lot of troubleshooting.\u201d<\/p>\n

But once they got it right, the insights flowed. Using nanoindentation, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and even Raman spectroscopy, the team measured everything from tooth enamel\u2019s elasticity and stiffness to mineral contents. Their samples, postnatal day 12 mouse teeth, were carefully chosen to be old enough for the enamel to have formed, but not so old that the bones became too hard to section.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A micro-CT scan image showing mineralization densities along the developing murine molar and incisor. Image developed by Marius Didziokas, a co-author on this paper.
\nWhat Can Teeth Tell Us About Disease?<\/p>\n

While Jiang and Vining analyzed the physical properties of teeth, Katsura brought in the biological side: mouse models of Mendelian genetic disorders, many of which mimic the human versions of craniofacial syndromes. Bhoj provided further expertise on these rare diseases, helping guide the project toward real-world clinical applications.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese disorders are hard to treat in part because little attention is paid to the oral cavity, so we don\u2019t always know how dental and oral conditions relate to the systemic issues these children face,\u201d says Katsura. \u201cBut we\u2019re showing that materials science can help us find part of the answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

One major challenge? Teeth start developing in utero, making early study difficult. But by examining how structure changes during development, and linking it with function, researchers hope to eventually backtrack from a fully developed tooth to better understand what went wrong along the way.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re excited to be able to integrate tools of materials science to learn about the properties of tooth development,\u201d says Vining. \u201cOur work lays the foundation for further studies that could lead to diagnostic tools or even new materials for fillings that prevent decay.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"An image taken through Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) showing a polished sagittal section through a mouse mandibular incisor, showing the different mineralized tissue layers.
\nTaking New Research and Mindsets Forward<\/p>\n

This work is already informing the team\u2019s future work on genetic craniofacial diseases in mice. Long term, the researchers envision their tools used in dental clinics to screen for enamel defects, assess treatment outcomes or even predict disease risk.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the project isn\u2019t just breaking scientific ground, it\u2019s also reshaping how researchers think about collaboration. Jiang, who trained as a materials scientist, reflects on her experience working outside her comfort zone.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t need to have everything figured out before working on a project. I\u2019ve learned that growth happens along the way and that learning from collaborators is one of the most valuable parts of scientific research,\u201d she says. \u201cThe most exciting discoveries come from different people bringing different strengths.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This work was partially supported by the Joseph and Josephine Rabinowitz Award for Excellence in Research from Penn Dental Medicine. This work was partly carried out at the Singh Center for Nanotechnology, supported by the NSF National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure Program under grant NNCI-2025608. Research reported in this publication was supported in part by a NIDCR Supplement from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number KL2TR001879.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Teeth may seem like static fixtures, but a new collaboration between engineers and clinicians is proving just how…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[64,63,336,25125,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-25772","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-genetics","11":"tag-mse","12":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}