Figure 4
Morphology and movement of mouse incisor ameloblasts. (A) An illustration of a longitudinal view of a mandibular incisor. A mandibular incisor was extracted from a 5-day-old Mmp20+/+-AT4 mouse. (B) Lateral incisor view. Elongated live tdTomato positive (red) ameloblasts in a small box above the asterisk, was magnified in the larger box in panel (B) located to the left bottom side. The extracted incisor was stained with Hoechst33342 (blue) and the surrounding non-ameloblast cells, which are located on the upper and lower sides of the red tdTomato, stained blue. An asterisk shows a crack that occurred during incisor extraction. (C) A lower magnification view from the same plane as (B). (D) Time-lapse imaging of tdTomato positive cells (ameloblasts) and the surrounding cells stained with Hoechst33342. (E) Individual tdTomato positive ameloblasts are shown with surrounding cells stained with Hoechst33342. These cells from panel (D) were marked with different colors and the cells were tracking for 3 h 40 min by Aivia. (F) Movement of the tdTomato positive cells (upper) and the surrounding cells stained with Hoechst33342 (lower) were plotted. Ameloblasts moved toward incisal tip. Conversely, the surrounding non-ameloblast cells stayed close to the same the locations. Six representative cells were shown per group. (G) Cell movement distance was assessed for 12 h and was compared between the tdTomato positive cells and the Hoechst33342 stained cells. tdTomato (+) n = 47, tdTomato (−) n = 48. ****p < 0.0001. Scale bars: 100 μm (B,D,E); 500 μm (C).
