Effects of Nogo-A deletion in the dental epithelium of the continuously growing mouse incisor

Nogo-A is a major player in the regulation of neural development and regeneration, and it is the target of several clinical trials. Despite its high clinical relevance, the functions of Nogo-A outside the central nervous system are mostly unknown. In this work, we investigated the role of Nogo-A in tooth development in mouse transgenic models. We observed that Nogo-A is expressed in ameloblasts, the cells responsible for the formation of enamel. We show that the deletion of Nogo-A in the dental epithelium leads to the formation of defective enamel. By RNA sequencing we showed that this phenotype is associated with the overexpression of clusters of genes involved in cell differentiation and production of enamel. The posterior half of the dental epithelium of incisors isolated from newborn K14cre; Nogo-A flox/flox mice and wild type controls was analyzed by RNA sequencing. The left and the right lower incisors of a single animal were pooled to generate 1 sample. A total of n = 4 wild type and n = 4 K14cre; Nogo-A flox/flox animals was analyzed