TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tapaltsyan, Vagan
A1  - Eronen, Jussi T.
A1  - Lawing, A. Michelle
A1  - Sharir, Amnon
A1  - Janis, Christine
A1  - Jernvall, Jukka
A1  - Klein, Ophir D.
T1  - Continuously growing rodent molars result from a predictable quantitative evolutionary change over 50 million years
T2  - Cell reports
N2  - The fossil record is widely informative about evolution, but fossils are not systematically used to study the evolution of stem-cell-driven renewal. Here, we examined evolution of the continuous growth (hypselodonty) of rodent molar teeth, which is fuelled by the presence of dental stem cells. We studied occurrences of 3,500 North American rodent fossils, ranging from 50 million years ago (mya) to 2 mya. We examined changes in molar height to determine whether evolution of hypselodonty shows distinct patterns in the fossil record, and we found that hypselodont taxa emerged through intermediate forms of increasing crown height. Next, we designed a Markov simulation model, which replicated molar height increases throughout the Cenozoic and, moreover, evolution of hypselodonty. Thus, by extension, the retention of the adult stem cell niche appears to be a predictable quantitative rather than a stochastic qualitative process. Our analyses predict that hypselodonty will eventually become the dominant phenotype.
Y1  - 2015
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/54357
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-543571
N1  - This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
VL  - 11
IS  - 5
SP  - 673
EP  - 680
ER  -