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(Medical-NewsWire.com, May 24, 2013 ) Watchung, NJ -- American Alligators have around 80 teeth, all of which fall out and are replaced by new teeth. Humans, on the other hand, only have two sets of teeth: baby teeth and adult teeth. If an adult tooth is lost, another organic tooth can not replace it.
According to researchers, they believe that dental lamina, the place where teeth grow from, become dormant in humans after the second set of teeth come in. In alligators, the stem cells never stop generating new teeth. The goal of the researchers, a large team of US and Chinese scientists, want to be able to eventually figure out new ways the dental lamina in humans can be stimulated to grow teeth in a needed situation.
Their research will also help other doctors and scientists determine why some people have a rare genetic condition that allows them to regrow teeth, or why some people have tumors that originate in the tooth bed.
To perform the study, the scientists injected a certain type of dye into the alligators’ gums that allowed them to see how the teeth grew in the first place, and visualize the cells that multiplied. It was already a known fact that Alligators have fully grown immature teeth below the current mature teeth, but being able to see the cells helped the scientists to understand why alligators shed teeth the way they do.
Researchers also prematurely pulled teeth to see what would happen if they weren’t naturally shed, such as if they would still regrow the teeth and how long it would take to do so.
While the study on alligator teeth is far from being able to actually regrow human teeth, the researchers concluded that human teeth probably have the same dental lamina and tooth stem cells as alligators, it just needs to be stimulated and learn to regrow teeth again.
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Source: EmailWire.Com 
Source: EmailWire.com
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