Leptin and vascular endothelial growth factor regulate angiogenesis in tooth germs.

Leptin, a 16 kDa non-glycolated polypeptide of 146 amino acids produced by the ob gene, has a variety of physiological roles not only in lipid metabolism, hematopoiesis, thermogenesis and ovarian function, but also in angiogenesis. This study focuses to investigate the possibility that leptin, as an angiogenic factor, may regulate the angiogenesis during tooth development. We firstly studied the expression of leptin and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) during tooth development immunohistochemically.

Possible involvement of maspin in tooth development.

Maspin is a 42 kDa serine protease inhibitor that possesses tumor suppressive and anti-angiogenic activities. Despite of a huge amount of data concerning the expression pattern of maspin in various tissues and its relevance to the biological properties of a variety of human cancer cells, little is known on the maspin expression in skeletal and tooth tissues. Recently, we reported that maspin may play an important role in extracellular matrix formation in bone by enhancing the accumulation of latent TGF-β in the extracellular matrix.

Possible involvement of melatonin in tooth development: expression of melatonin 1a receptor in human and mouse tooth germs.

Melatonin is known to regulate a variety of physiological processes including control of circadian rhythms, regulation of seasonal reproductive function, regulation of body temperature, free radical scavenging, and so forth. Accumulating evidence from in vitro and in vivo experiments has also suggested that melatonin may have an influence on skeletal growth and bone formation. However, little is known about the effects of melatonin on tooth development and growth, which thus remain to be elucidated.