Facts and hypotheses concerning the control of odontoblast differentiation

Numerous studies using amphibians have demonstrated that preodontoblasts emerging from the dental papilla are derived from cranial neural crest cells [4, 12, 46, 64]. However this has not been established for mammals. The history of odonotogenesis begins during the early stages of cranial-facial development when the maxillary and mandibular processes processes develop. Continuous epithelio-mesenchymal interactions condition the histogenesis and morphogenesis of the teeth [24-26, 43, 44, 49, 51, 58] as well as the terminal differentiation of odontoblasts and ameloblasts [23, 47, 52, 54, 59, 61, 67]. During recent years a considerable amount of experimental data relating to differentiation of odontoblasts has been published. We summarize these data and attempt to integrate them in deductive hypothesis concerning the control of odontoblast differentiation.