Penn Dental Study Uncovers What Biological Makeup of Teeth Can Teach Us

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Jul 28, 2025, 09:21 ET

PHILADELPHIA, July 28, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Teeth may seem like static fixtures, but new research is proving just how dynamic, informative, and medically significant they can be.

In a recent study in the American Chemical Society's Applied Materials & Interfaces, an interdisciplinary team uncovered how teeth, as biological material, hold key information for understanding rare craniofacial disorders that develop during childhood. Led by Kyle Vining, Assistant Professor at Penn Dental Medicine and Penn Engineering, the team includes collaborators from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Penn Medicine, and Penn's Institute of Translational Medicine and Therapeutics.

Through their new methodology and by leveraging unique characteristics of rodent teeth, the team combined materials science, mineralogy, and human genetics to map 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.

"People often assume that if you understand bone, you understand teeth," says Vining. "But teeth have a different composition, require different analytical tools, and behave differently during development."

The project is centered on a simple question: How do teeth mineralize? Surprisingly, scientists don't have a full picture of how this essential process unfolds. To answer this question, researchers borrowed a tool from geology: the nanoindenter, a device that tests the hardness of rocks, using it to analyze tiny sections of tooth enamel.

With nanoindentation, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy, and even Raman spectroscopy, the team measured everything from tooth enamel's 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.

"We're excited to integrate tools of materials science to learn about the properties of tooth development," says Vining. "This lays the foundation for further studies that could lead to diagnostic tools or even new materials for fillings that prevent decay."

Along with the physical properties of teeth, they looked at the biological side: mouse models of Mendelian genetic disorders, many of which mimic the human versions of craniofacial syndromes. This work is already informing their ongoing work on genetic craniofacial diseases in mice. Long term, the researchers envision their tools used to screen for enamel defects, assess treatment outcomes, or even predict disease risk.