Mutant Chickens Grow Full Set of Teeth

FOXNews said:

Wednesday, February 22, 2006
By Bjorn Carey


Chicken will grow teeth when pigs can fly.
Well, better start searching the skies for flying pork — scientists have discovered a mutant chicken with a full set of crocodile-like chompers.
Researchers also tweaked the genes of normal chickens to grow teeth.
The mutant chick, called Talpid, also had severe limb defects and died before hatching.
Although it was discovered 50 years ago, no one had ever examined its mouth.
"What we discovered were teeth similar to those of crocodiles — not surprising as birds are the closest living relatives of the reptile," said Mark Ferguson of the University of Manchester in England.
What happened
Around 300 million years ago, the ancestor of all modern fully terrestrial vertebrates gave rise to two lineages, the mammals and the reptiles/birds.
The oldest reptiles, such as crocodiles and alligators, had cone-shaped teeth. So did the earliest birds, called archosaurs.
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Then, around 80 million years ago, modern birds emerged without teeth.
"So what would you expect bird teeth to look like? You would expect them to have teeth like their ancestors and their most closely related living relative," study co-author John Fallon, of the University of Wisconsin, told LiveScience.
Indeed, Talpid's teeth are conical, much like an archosaur's and closely resembling the teeth of a baby alligator or crocodile, Fallon said.
If the chick had survived, the teeth would most likely have been reabsorbed into the mouth.
The archosaurs had mouths similar in shape to a reptile's. It turns out that developing a beak caused birds to lose their teeth.
"The reason that birds lost their teeth is that in forming a beak, the two tissues that ‘talk' to each other to make a tooth become separated," Fallon said. "They can't have the conversation to make a tooth. In the mutant, these tissues are brought back together."
Make more mutants
The finding made scientists curious whether healthy chickens still possessed the 80-million-year-old genetic pathway for producing teeth.
By making a few changes to the expression of certain molecules in the pathway, the researchers were able to induce tooth growth in normally developing chickens.
These teeth also looked like reptilian teeth and shared many of the same genetic traits, supporting the scientists' hypothesis. None of these chickens were allowed to hatch.
This is all good news for hockey players. A direct application of this research, Ferguson said, could be re-growing teeth in people who have lost them through accident or disease.
The research is detailed this week in the journal Current Biology.

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