What contribution can model organisms make in learning to make human teeth?
I think this is one of the open questions for the next decade of research. What are these models really for? What I see happening – for teeth and really any human organ or disease – is the genomic resources now are so good for humans, we might not need model organisms for particular diseases in the future. It’s actually just as easy to go to human populations and directly ask which genes are responsible for this and that trait. But if you follow how genomic information is now being used to find human disease genes, we still need models that allow you to assemble the map between genotype and phenotype. Many of our current models, including mouse, zebrafish, and fruit fly, represent homogenous, inbred lines. In other words, they have been bred this way to make the genetics easier. Humans have heterogeneous genomes, and that’s why identifying a specific genetic cause of a disease has turned out to be difficult. We see our cichlid fish and some other emerging evolutionary models as being a
