Morphology of the maxillary lateral incisor in cases of unilateral impaction of the maxillary canine.

Two groups of subjects who demonstrated unilateral maxillary canine impaction were examined, a Caucasian group and an Oriental group. It was found that there are significant differences between the groups for sex of patients seeking treatment, site of impaction (buccal/palatal), and arch form. The Oriental group was significantly more crowded in the canine area than the Caucasian group. In almost all cases the dimensions of the lateral incisor on the side of impaction were smaller than the non-impacted side, although five subjects from the Caucasian female sub-group did not conform to this pattern, and for the Oriental male sub-group the mesiodistal crown width was larger on the impacted side.

Defining intermediate stages in cell determination: acquisition of a lens-forming bias in head ectoderm during lens determination.

Cell determination in vertebrates requires integration of many events, although the mechanisms controlling the different stages in this process are poorly understood. While studies of lens determination have helped define some of these stages, we know very little about the intermediate steps involved in the commitment of ectoderm to lens formation. Lens determination begins during gastrulation when ectoderm is briefly competent to respond to lens-inducing signals and progresses to a point, at the neural tube stage, when the presumptive lens ectoderm is specified. Between these two stages important regulatory genes are activated in the presumptive lens ectoderm, including the transcription factor Pax-6, and transplantation experiments presented here suggest that the presumptive lens ectoderm is becoming "biased" toward lens formation. We show that competent ectoderm from Xenopus laevis embryos forms well-differentiated lenses in most cases when transplanted to the presumptive lens area of neural plate stage hosts, where the lens-inductive environment is strong. When placed into later, neural tube stage hosts, optimally competent ectoderm does form small lenses in about half the cases, but the overall response is much weaker. Even in this weakly inducing environment, however, lens ectoderm that is part way through the inductive process (at the neural plate stage) is shown to have a lens-forming bias, since it forms well differentiated lenses in nearly all cases. While we find that ectoderm surrounding the lens-forming area at neural plate stages does not have a lens-forming bias, non-lens head ectoderm at the neural tube stage does, suggesting that a large region of head ectoderm is biased during neurulation. Using Rana palustris embryos, a species used in the earliest lens induction studies, we were also able to show that the optic vesicle can induce lenses in non-lens head ectoderm at neural tube stages. These results lead us to refine the definition of lens cell determination and provide a context that should allow clarification of determination mechanisms.