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Why Do Some Teeth Have Thicker Enamel than Others?

Projects:
Integrative Human Evolutionary Biology (HEBDP)
Institution:
George Washington University
Primary Strategic Goal:
Discovery: Foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge, emphasizing areas of greatest opportunity and potential benefit and establishing the Nation as a global leader in fundamental transformational science and engineering.
Secondary Strategic Goal:
Research Infrastructure: Build the Nation's research capability through critical investments in advanced instrumentation, facilities, cyber infrastructure, and experimental tools.

Achievement/Results

Lucas with Paul Constantino (IGERT doctoral graduate) and colleagues at GWU, NIST, UCSC and Duke University have deciphered dietary signals from a theoretical and experimental study of the structure and properties of modern human teeth and of mammals having diets analogous to extinct hominins. The work combines anatomy, biomechanics and materials science and represents a unique achievement in the subject, taking traditional concerns of dental anatomists and showing that these clearly have adaptive value. This research was recently published in Bioessays, (2008) 30: 374-285, and it was featured in a New and Views commentary in Nature (2008) 452: 703-705.

Address Goals

It is truly novel, world-class, research, it is expressly interdisciplinary (it involves anatomists, primatologists and materials scientists) and it has implications for the design of dental implants.

Posted:
February 16, 2009