See How They Grow

Thanks to Japanese scientists we may soon be able to say sayonara to dentures. Researchers at Tokyo University of Science successfully grew teeth from stem cells.

According to the UK's Daily Mail, the experiments were conducted using two sets of mouse stem cells, which together contained the tooth-growing blueprint. After five days, a tooth "bud" appeared in the petri dish and was transplanted into a mouse's jaw. Five weeks later the mouse cut a tooth, and in another two weeks it was fully grown.

Lather, rinse, repeat — many times. Enough times to report the results to the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Kazuhisa Nakao told the Mail: "Every bio-engineered tooth erupted through the gum and had every tooth component such as dentine, enamel, pulp, blood vessels, nerve fibers, crown and root." And the teeth weren’t just cosmetically correct: The mice had zero trouble chowing down, researchers say.

The hunt is now on for human cells, with strong contenders being skin cells or cells from inside the tooth pulp. Researchers will also have to figure out how to make the teeth know to stop growing when they reach the right size — call it a new spin on “wisdom tooth,” perhaps?