Abstract
Our long-term goal is to identify and characterize molecular mechanisms regulating tooth development, including those mediating the critical dental epithelial-dental mesenchymal (DE-DM) cell interactions required for normal tooth development. The goal of this study was to investigate Chemerin (Rarres2)/ChemR23(Cmklr1) signaling in DE-DM cell interactions in normal tooth development. Here we present, for the first time, tissue-specific expression patterns of Chemerin and ChemR23 in mouse tooth development. We show that Chemerin is expressed in cultured DE progenitor cells, while ChemR23 is expressed in cultured DM cells. Moreover, we demonstrate that ribosomal protein S6 (rS6) and Akt, downstream targets of Chemerin/ChemR23 signaling, are phosphorylated in response to Chemerin/ChemR23 signaling in vitro and are expressed in mouse tooth development. Together, these results suggest roles for Chemerin/ChemR23-mediated DE-DM cell signaling during tooth morphogenesis.