Healthy dental enamel is the hardest and most highly mineralized human tissue. Though acellular, nonvital, and without capacity for turnover or repair, it can nevertheless last a lifetime. Amelogenesis imperfecta (AI) is a collective term for failure of normal enamel development, covering diverse clinical phenotypes that typically show Mendelian inheritance patterns. One subset, known as hypoma...

Tooth primordia at early stages of mineralization in the sharks Negaprion brevirostris and Triaenodon obesus were examined electron microscopically for evidence of ameloblastic secretion and its relation to calcification of the enamel (enameloid) layer. Ameloblasts are polarized with most of the mitochondria and all of the Golgi dictyosomes localized in the infranuclear end of the cell toward t...

In the field of dentistry, the murine incisor has long been considered as an outstanding model to study amelogenesis. However, it clearly appears that enamel from wild type mouse incisors and molars presents several structural differences. In incisor, exclusively radial enamel is observed. In molars, enamel displays a high level of complexity since the inner part is lamellar whereas the outer e...