The Company of Biologists, Development, 2015
DOI: 10.1242/dev.124248
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Teeth are a classic model system of organogenesis, as repeated and reciprocal epithelial and mesenchymal interactions pattern placode formation and outgrowth. Less is known about the developmental and genetic bases of tooth development and replacement in polyphyodonts, vertebrates with continual tooth replacement. Here we leverage natural variation in the threespine stickleback fish Gasterosteus aculeatus to investigate the developmental genetic bases of tooth development and replacement. We find that two derived freshwater stickleback populations have both convergently evolved more ventral pharyngeal teeth through heritable genetic changes. In both populations, evolved tooth gain manifests late in development. Using pulse-chase vital dye labeling to mark newly forming teeth in adult fish, we find that both high-toothed freshwater populations have accelerated tooth replacement rates relative to low-toothed ancestral marine fish. Despite the similar evolved phenotype of more teeth and an accelerated adult replacement rate, the timing of tooth number divergence and the spatial patterns of newly formed adult teeth are different in the two populations, suggesting distinct developmental mechanisms. Using genome-wide linkage mapping in marine-freshwater F2 genetic crosses, we find that the genetic basis of evolved tooth gain in the two freshwater populations is largely distinct. Together our results support a model where increased tooth number and an accelerated tooth replacement rate have evolved convergently in two independently derived freshwater stickleback populations using largely distinct developmental and genetic mechanisms.